Dutch cake

Dear all,

For Christmas two friends of mine gave me some Dutch sugar decoration and some white fondant icing... this called for a cake of course! And so for our new years party I made a cake using these awesome Christmas gifts.

Of course because the sugar decorations were Dutch I decided to make a Dutch cake. So I made a speculaas cake! Normally I really associate that with "Sinterklaas", sometimes explained as the Dutch Christmas, but I figured it just had to be done.

So what I did is I made a square speculaas cake.



I then cut the cake in half once it had cooled down and smeared the middle part with 'speculoos', which is a kind of speculaas flavoured peanut butter. This should make a nice gooey center for the cake.



I then stuck the two halves back together and covered the whole cake with speculaas flavoured butter cream icing. This layer of butter cream icing is both delicious and practical - it will help the fondant icing stick to the cake!



Next I refrigerated the cake so that the butter cream icing wouldn't be too smudgy when putting on the fondant icing. This also helped me smooth it out further. I took the cake out of the fridge in plenty of time before starting work on the fondant so that it wouldn't start to 'sweat'. I first started with white icing.



Next I coloured part of the white icing blue, with food colouring. I did this because the sugar decorations are blue and white (resembling 'Delfts blauw') and so that I could create a type of tile pattern. This to emulate typical Dutch Delft blue tiles. I did this right before I wanted to use the icing, which was not great timing! It required a lot of adding food colouring, then maizena to make it less sticky, recolour it (not deep enough blue), add maizena etc. And in the mean time my hands resembled that of a smurf (and did so for several days after!). However, I succeeded, and I started covering the cake.




I smoothed out the icing with a special tool and got a beautifully smooth, white, square cake! Pretty awesome I say! Not done yet though of course. After struggling quite a bit with the blue icing and its consistency I finally had it almost manageable. It wasn't perfect, and it did crumble a bit, but definitely did not take away from the impact of the blue and white contrast. Pretty! Time to add the sugar decorations too.





And then finally the time had come - I took the cake to my friends' house, we had a lovely dinner with this super cake for dessert!! Check out the inside as well, doesn't that look scrumptious!?



Well I had a blast making this cake, thank you again friends who gave me the decorations and fondant icing, you know who you are. I love how gifts like that can send me on an inspired baking adventure, succesfully too!!

Coming up soon, some spicy baking adventures. Stay tuned ;)

xoxo Jennifer