Engagement Party: Cake

19 July 2007    2 Comments

The earth is made of cake and chocolate
And Id be icing if I could
Live in a dream
In your stream
Live in a dream

I like cake
I like cake
I like cake
I like cake

Okay, so that wasn’t too good, unlike the cake at my engagement party.

Due to chickz0r’s mother being unwell recently, it came upon chickz0r and I to construct it. Now, as a few of you know, I actually enjoy decorating cakes. For chickz0rs 19th birthday, I baked a Skull cake (no photos, they got lost :(), and for 20th, I baked a Stargate cake (that was interesting to do, I had very little time to do it before the guests arrived! Photo sucks by the way).
For Christmas’, I tend to make Faux Christmas Puddings. I happened to once make a gingerbread house for the neighbours, but photos of that are MIA.

Thats really about the limit of my baking/decorating, I’m still very much in the learning stage.

Keeping with the theme of general funness with the engagement party, we decided we wanted a castle cake.

Recipe’s

Cake

Ingredients

Method

  1. Preheat oven to moderate.
  2. Grease (and line) pan.
  3. Sift flour and cocoa into medium bowl, add remaining ingredients
  4. Mix until all smoth and a lightish colour
  5. Spread into prepared pan.
  6. Bake in moderate oven until cake is cooked.
  7. Stand cake in pan 5 to 10 minutes; turn onto wire rack to cool.

This is a really easy cake to make, but it tastes rather good (and is fairly hard to mess up!) – its not too ‘light’ but not too ‘gluggy’ for a chocolate cake. It has become my ‘defacto’ for chocolate cakes that I make.

Caramel Filling

We had planned to go with a slight modification of the Caramel Sauce Recipe on SimpleRecipes‘, just swap plain/white/whatever sugar for raw/brown sugar. It didn’t work out. Twice. So we ended up just using four cans of Caramel Top’N'Fill

Icing

Butter Icing and Fondant icing – ye standard recipes, you can find them yourself. I was told a lot of icing was made. Butter icing first layer, fondant the second layer.

Unfortunately, the noise made by the bridesmaids when they invaded the kitchen drove me out, so it was left to Ryan (best man) and chickz0r to ice the cake while I went and finished our costumes.
Ryan isn’t exactly a cake-friendly person. He eats cake, and thats about it. That being said, he did a fantastic job of icing it, and even enjoyed himself to boot!

I came in at various times, and it was a mammoth effort of icing. I think they went through four packets of icing sugar, and it took about three or four hours to get done.

Each tower is sponge log (scroll? You get them from the supermarket). Parapets are icing squares.
The most surprising thing about this was that the towers stayed attached overnight. That alone was a feat in itself.

Overall

The cake tasted and looked fantastic.
Super proud of Chickz0r/Ryan, and super happy with how the thing turned out


Comments

2 Comments

  1. chickz0r says:
    July 21, 2007 at 11:01 am

    I agree, the cake took hours and hours to ice – in fact I left before it was finished. I needed to sleep. But I must say, the icing took far more than four packets of icing sugar. It was closer to ten.

    Adding the caramel filling, while tasty, was a gross gross project. It glopped out of the cans in can shape, but was easy to spread. Karen, my dear sister-in-law threaded chopped bits of mint leaves onto wire then wound them around the towers. My brother Aaron made the pretty flags.

    Obviously, kudos to Ryan for spending four hours mixing, kneading and rolling icing. He put in a mammoth effort!

    Reply

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