Coconut-Lemon cake

Dear all,

This week I would like to show you a runner-up for the 80th birthday cake competition. This coconut and lemon cake unfortunately did not make it to the final cut, I couldn't get the balance right I felt, but I couldn't dismiss it completely. Here it is:

Getting my (new!) kitchen ready:









Then mixing the eggs etc until the lot doubles in size:



Tadaa 2 lemon coconuts cake cooling down! Time to make the lemon custard and lemon/coconut icing to fill and cover the cake:






Finally time to put the whole thing together, starting to look good.







And there it is, all done. I wasn't too happy about the density of the cake, or how the lemon custard etc turned out. I will have to have a few more go's at this cake to get it right, because in essence I think it's a great cake. Especially as it was a bit different to what I normally do (chocolaaatteee). Better luck next time!

xoxo Jennifer

80th Birthday Cake pt. 2

Dear all,

Last week I promised to show you the four-layer chocolate cake, so here it is! Putting this cake together is quite a trick, so I'll try to show you how I did it:

First up of course: getting things ready! I got a greaty recipe stand a while ago which is extremely handy. Now this cake requires baking 4 different cakes, in 2 batches.





Next is putting the lot together. The cake goes from vanilla to chocolate, so to get the right effect I needed to stick them togehter (with chocolate spread) in the right order.





Last, but certainly not least, covering the whole thing in chocolate! I made a kind of chocolate ganache with milk and dark chocolate (which to start off with was a little runny - the day I made the cake for Steve the ganache worked out better; the pictures above are from my test run at home ;) )



Although this towering chocolate cake is already pretty impressive in itself, I added some decorations (chocolate mocca beans and tiny gold balls) to finish it off for the day itself. Here is the result (With Steve cutting the cake after his speech)



Now, you are of course all wondering what this four layer business is. Feast your chocolate-loving eyes on this:



Pretty impressive I think! This cake looks great and isn't hard to make. It's all a bit time consuming, but SO worthwhile. Loved it (and so did everyone else. I even converted a couple non-chocolate-cake-believers!).

See you again next week for Coconut-Lemon cake, yum!

xoxo Jennifer

80th Birthday Cake

Dear all,

Last weekend I celebrated the 80th birthday of my (step-) grandad Steve, in England. He of course celebrated in style with a big party, and silly me suggested making cake. Little did I know it was to be cake for 30 people!! In the end I came up with 2 cakes to make. One stunning 4-layer chocolate cake, and a fail-proof carrot cake, with some very special decorations ;)

This week I will show you the lovely and most delicious carrot cake, with West Highland White Terrier (Westie) decorations! This in honour of Steve's lovely puppy Daisy.






For those of you wondering what a strange position the Westie above is lying in, here's a picture of Daisy, doing just that ;)












As you can see, the cake turned into a realy "Daisy" cake! With thanks to Heleen for helping me make these cute decorations (and my mum for helping me put them back together - they did not survive the flight very well).

Next week I will show you the chocolate cake!

xoxo Jennifer

Birthday Cake: the making of

Dear all,

This is a bit of a cheat, but I had no new material so there you go! I had a lot more pictures of the cake I showed you last week, but no time to upload them. So this week I thought I'd show you the making of this fabulous cake.



So here's what it looks like in the beginning. You have three cakes which alternate chocolate and vanilla. Stack them with lovely chocolate buttercream icing in between.



Then, my favourite part: cover the whole thing in melted chocolate, yay! Then I leave that to "dry" while I make the decorations. I used marzipan and food colouring to make a shoe, with extra pearl sheen and some gold sugar balls. Not bad for a first try I say!



Next, assemble! Not only did I make a shoe and flowers with different coloured marzipan, as well as the letters, I also made two colours of butter cream icing for some pretty piping.



And there you have it, one amazing cake! The extra fun part is of course the checker board inside. See my previous post for a picture of that. Always an impressive cake this one, with lots of room to vary (I've made it before as you may recall). Enjoy!

xoxo Jennifer

Birthday cake

Dear all,

A while ago I made a birthday cake for one of my colleagues at work. She loves shoes (walk in shoe closet anyone?) and even has a shoe calendar at work, so all I could do was make a shoe cake. With marzipan, food colouring and food gloss I made a pink pump! Woo!



Working with marzipan actually turned out to be quite fun. It's easier to get here than sugar paste or something and it absorbs liquid food colouring better (as do my hands mind you!). I went for a chocolate brown and pink theme for the rest of the cake with lots of marzipan flowers to mark the beginning of spring, oh yeah!



And of course the cake itself was a nice surprise for my colleagues! They hadn't seen this signature cake of mine yet.

xoxo Jennifer

cake!

Dear all,

Sometimes people just bring me awesome cakes. Woohoo!



"donated cake". These cakes were given to us as a donation instead of money at a charity event I co-organised. They were both heavenly!



This strawberry mousse shortbread cake was given to us at work by the Okura Hotel in Amsterdam. Wow that was good, and I don't even really anything strawberry flavoured!! (except real strawberries that is).





Cake cake cake!

xoxo Jennifer

Korean food

Dear all,

Work has gotten the better of me, I have failed in my updates! But here's one, of some lovely Korean food I made! Soup, beef/veggie rolls, kimchi... yum!