Easter Cake - Update

 The Easter cake is very nearly finished. All I need to do is add a piece of co-ordinating ribbon to the edge of the cake board and we are done!

 Looking at the cake as a finished piece, I have a soft-spot for the marzipan duck and chicks - they make me cheerful when I see them guarding the fake cake (the cake is a dummy cake for my assessment). There are some imperfections that do niggle me a bit - I can't help it, it's the perfectionist diva in me. However, I know what I would need to do to put these things right to improve the finish for future cakes, which I guess is the important thing.

In more news, we take delivery of our new oven on Saturday! I feel a bit of a traitor to the sisterhood doing a  little kitchen dance at this exciting news especially as it's International Women's Day and I'm cooing over pictures of the oven like a proud parent! However, like a baby, this oven is long over-due and presents a new chapter in my life as Becky BakesWell. Living without an oven for seven months has been torturous - no homemade roasties in all this time (cue sniffling and sob). My family have been kind enough to let me use their ovens to bake cakes for friends, and without them, my mission to start delivering cake happiness would have been impossible indeed!

This weekend, roasties and cake baking are on my agenda - will post more recipes and cake related adventures soon!

Happy Baking,
Becky B x

Easter Cake Project

Hey there!

For readers that don't know me, I travel quite a distance to work from where I live and in Winter, my morning commute to Yorkshire across the Pennines in the fog and murky light can be grim. However, with the light mornings and warmer weather here, it's nice to see the landscape changing along with the seasons. This morning I noticed that the snowdrops are also shooting up in the gardens that I pass - a sure fire sign that Spring is on its way and Easter is around the corner. So, with this in mind, I thought I'd add a post about my Easter cake project. I have been inspired by Peggy Porschen's simple and kitsch duck motif cake below.

I started off with a plain white sugar paste covered dummy cake as the basis of the design, which I have then embossed with butterflies and a flower design which looks a bit like Broderie Anglaise. I also added a crimped border around the top edge of the cake, in the shape of bows. 

The second stage of the design consisted of painting the embossed decorations with powdered pigments. It's best to use vodka as the liquid to mix with the powders as this dries much quicker than water and therefore is less likely to bleed. 

I've also modelled a duck and chicks out of marzipan which I have tinted yellow, adding beaks from orange tinted marzipan. These models will sit on top of the cake, inside the circle of flowers. To unify the different aspects of the design, I've started to make a border for the bottom of the cake out of balls of pink and yellow sugarpaste, in a graduated design, which will pull the colours together. 

Here are the pics of the work in progress:

Can't wait to finish the decoration and post the finished results!

Until then,
Happy Baking x