help needed please! re birthday cake

[redundant]

hello, we are on a budget this year so I foolishly decided I would make daughters birthday cake, not that I have any experience of baking other than the occasional sponge! Can you lovely people help me?

We have about 40 people to give a small piece of cake to. I have a 10" round tin - that should be ok with just two layers shouldn't it?

I understand madeira cake is best for decorating but i can't find a 10"recipe online anywhere - help?

What do I fill it with? buttercream and jam?

And lastl y decoration - she wants a little mermaid cake a bit like this (but not as good!): sprinklebellecakes.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/little-mermaid-cake.html

What icing should I cover it in to get a rough wavy effect? Or should I stick to blue fondant as am novice? And what should i make the starfish etc out of? - fondant or something else?

sorry for the million Qs, any help gratefully received as google is just confusing me!

sorry here's the pic hopefully - had wanted to link to the blog i found it on to credit them

10" sounds fine for 40 people serving small pieces, though I am no expert. You'd probably do best to cut it into squares rather than trying to cut it like a normal round cake as doing thin slices can be quite hard.

www.lindyscakes.co.uk/2009/07/27/how-to-i-change-a-cake-recipe-quanities/ says to do 1.5 * a recipe for an 8 inch tin to scale up to a 10 inch.

I'd fill it with buttercream and jam and use buttercream for the wavy icing. However buttercream can be a bit yellow due to the butter, so I am not sure if the blue would come out a bit green.

The stars do look like fondant.

thank you! I am going to do a trial run with the buttercream for the top and see how it looks!

if i make it the day before and ice it, should i store in just somewhere cool, rather than fridge? And do i need to cover it? thanks x

In your shoes I would buy some ready made madeira cakes with buttercream filling and then do the decorating yourself. Sainsbury's do some large slabs for 89p and then sandwich them all together with butter icing.

If you have never covered a cake before with sugar-paste fondant then you will find it very tricky. A buttercream covering would be better and you can tint in any colour you want. Tesco's are doing a 5 pack of gel colours for £3.99. They are primary colours but you can mix to get different colours i.e green and yellow to make blue or you can buy small bottles of blue water based dye for about £1. Once you have done your butter icing you can always put it in the fridge and then smooth it over again to get a more professional finish. You can buy ready made cake toppers or look on ebay for specific ones like the little mermaid but these tend to be quite expensive but if you haven't done any cake modelling before then it can save you lots of time and effort. Good luck!

Sorry try and avoid storing the cake in a fridge as it really dries it out but you will need to cover it wherever you are storing it to keep in the moisture.

thank you- the ready made cake sounds appealing - i will investigate!

I was thinking blue buttercream on the top and make it look rough like waves, so it doesn't require too much skill! She has a little mermaid figurine I can stick on the top already. I will let you know how i get on...

How about using a roasting tin -around A4 size? You could make 2 cakes and sandwich them together with jam/cream cheese icing/buttercream. It is much easier to get lots of small pieces with a square/rectangular cake. Also, you could have the effect of a fish tank, using things like strawberry shoelaces for waterweed etc - I am sure you can google 'aquarium cake'. Mary Berry has lots of 'traybake' recipes, lemon, chocolate, vanilla etc. You can level off the top to get a flat surface and turn it upside down so the trimmed section is on the cake board, and you won't have a problem with lots of loose crumbs getting into the icing.

A good place for storing a cake is in a (not being used) oven, it's big enough to fit the cake in and away from any prying and picking fingers. I finish my cakes off in the night, then loosely cover them over with foil and stick them in the cold oven.

You can colour the butter cream and blue gel colouring works well, you could also use the gel neat (iykwim) to emphasise the waves, like draw little squiggles/lines over the top of the wave to get a deeper blue, as the gel is also transparent it will look like water :)

We used ready made cake for DD one year as we were on holiday. We made a swimming pool cake. The cake was fine, but under no circumstances buy ready made buttercream. It was disgusting.

Buying a plain cake may also be cheaper than making one. Unless you use really cheap ingredients, home made cake is quite expensive.

Buy a cake, cover in blue buttercream, stick a mermaid on top. Sounds like the cheap and easy option. If you mix up buttercream and then add blue, don't fully mix in the color as it will look more like real waves then

gosh you're all fab! I need all these tips! I am going to either do the round 10" or possibly the shop bought and then decorate thing - I think it might be simpler to just make it rather than try to sandwich shop bought into the right shape, but will see.

I think I'm ok on making buttercream, so as long as I colour it ok, that should be alright.

I'm not sure what I'm going to use to cover it once made when i store it - presumably I could make a tent over it out of foil or something?

I will try to take a photo once done! (unless it turns out awful!)

Just to hijack/join in; I just spent hours practice-making a madeira iglu (whilst trying to field the Small Person age 11months) and the offcuts are a bit…disappointing. It might be a 'good firm base' for icing but I am not impressed with the flavour -its a bit dry! Tastes rather like shop bought cake to be honest…

Might have to try a different cake recipe for my iglu! I have a bit less than a month to crack this.

So, my tuppence worth : If you do make from scratch - make a yummy cake and ice it, if you want madeira, buy it in.

update - i found a 10" madeira recipe online and had a trial run yesterday. Oh my word - massive cake alert! The ingredients barely fitted in my mixing bowl! However, it did look fab, and was really firm so no danger of it falling apart. No need to make two - the one rose above the level of the tin, so just sliced it into half to sandwich.

Taste-wise ok but texture was really heavy and a bit stodgy compared to a victoria sponge, which i suppose was what i should have expected. In hindsight think I should have gone the shop-bought route - next year will do that. But going to plough on this year, although pretty much resigned to fact it's not going to save me vast amounts of money on buying one!

Tempted to try making a 10" victoria sponge and see if it comes out ok, but think it would probably just be a waste of time/ingredients, as will be too light and crumbly I think. So heavy brick of madeira it is - good job they're only getting a small square each!

Going to have a practise with buttercream at the weekend. thanks for all your help so far!

Once iced you won't need to cover it with anything to store it, and it'll last fine for up to a couple of weeks. Buttercream is super easy- either butter or margarine, ideally do it in a mixer and feed it with icing sugar until it's as thick as you need it to be. You can add drops of water to soften it if it's too firm. Avoid milk as then it should be kept in a fridge which is not ideal for the rest of the cake. Add colour as and when you want to.

I use a pound cake recipie for almost all cakes I make- following a recipe of 1lb of sugar and stork, 8 eggs and 1lb of sr flour. That's pretty much perfect to fill an 8" round cake tin. Then use this chart- www.lindyscakes.co.uk/2009/07/27/how-to-i-change-a-cake-recipe-quanities/
To work out how to adjust the recipie for different size tins. I always line my tins with greaseproof paper which goes above the tin by a couple of inches as sometimes they grow, which is great! They then can be cut through the middle and filled. For colours use sugarflair paste colours available online.

Good luck!

I learnt a good tip from a friend to cutting a large, round cake. When serving, cut a circle in the middle of the cake (like ending up with two cakes), and then you can cut the outer slices easily. Then cut the "inner" cake as usual!