Carrots in a garden bed cake

I have to thank The Partiologist for this wonderful design of a garden bed......

... which, when cut into, reveals carrots growing underground!

My 'carrot' seems to be a little lopsided and possibly even a bit fragmented.

You can see The Partiologist's original here ... and I admit hers is better! 

This is what you need to begin (the full recipe is at the bottom).

I used a basic pound cake mixture divided into one quarter / three quarters - one quarter has to be dyed orange and baked as a sort of half cake:

You need enough to get a line of 'carrots' from it.

I cut the carrots by hand to be as long as the baking tin was deep.

Oil the pan, then stand the carrots, points upwards, in a row down the middle. Help them to stay in place with some baking paper, then freeze them in the tin.

When the tin is frozen, pour the other three quarters of the mixture (flavoured and tinted with cocoa) around the carrots and pop it all in the oven.

When the cake comes out of the oven, upend it - you should be able to see the tops of the carrots through the base.

I made a boiled chocolate icing and poured it generously on, so that a lot of it ran down the sides.

The toothpicks that you see in this pic were the result of The Partiologist's advice that you should mark where the tops of the carrots are. But it seemed to me, after doing it, that it wasn't really necessary, as I had put in an unbroken line of carrots. So I took them out.

Next comes the dirt for the garden bed! This is wonderfully easy, thanks to the qualities of the 'accidental vegan cookie', the Oreo. Yes folks, the makers of Oreo, in trying to make a cheap all purpose cookie, somehow managed to use absolutely no animal products. Therefore the Oreo has gained a totally undeserved (because accidental) cult status amongst vegans.

All you need to do is halve the Oreos, scrape off the yucky fake cream centre, and blitz the cookies in a food processor for 20 seconds. The result is incredibly like grains of dirt.

Sprinkle your Oreo dirt all over the chocolate icing and heap it up at the bottom for a realistic garden bed!

Next you need some leaves for the carrot tops. As you can see in this pic, I dyed some fondant icing green, rolled it out and used a Christmas holly leaf cutter to cut some leaves. Then I cut off the distinctive 'holly' spikes to make a smooth-edged leaf.

I gave them a bit of shape by draping them over the side of a big saucer to dry.

The leaves then need to be assembled on top of the cake to form little clumps. The idea is that you should be able to cut through the leaf clumps and get....

...To reveal the carrots beneath the soil!

Happy eating from Dr Cupcake!!!


RECIPE: 

One large loaf tin, greased, floured and the base lined with baking paper

Chocolate/Vanilla Pound Cake 

240g butter
200g caster sugar
4 eggs
1 tsp vanilla essence
12 tbsp milk
350g self-raising flour
50g cocoa
1/2 tsp baking powder
orange food colouring
1 x packet Oreo cookies
one quantity boiled chocolate icing (see below)
one quantity fondant leaves (see below)

Boiled Chocolate Icing 
*Makes about double the quantity you'll need - you can freeze the rest almost indefinitely and use it for another cake

150g caster sugar
150ml water
300g dark chocolate, chopped into small pieces (I use 70% cocoa - the greater the cocoa mass, the more chocolatey the taste)
Sugar thermometer or a glass of iced water

Fondant Leaves
*Makes about 30 leaves, each approximately 6mm long

30g white fondant icing
1/4 tsp green gel food colouring
cornflour for sprinkling
small rolling pin
leaf cutter
small knife
latex kitchen glove x 1


Set oven at 175C.

Cream butter and sugar (butter should be at room temperature). Beat in the eggs and essence and mix well.

Sift half of the self-raising flour into the mixture and stir; then pour half the milk in; follow with the other half of the self-raising flour and the other half of the milk.

Scoop about a quarter of the mixture into another bowl and add enough orange food colour to make it bright orange, then scoop it into the baking tin and bake for 20 mins or until it springs back in the centre. Turn out and cool on a rack.

When cooled, cut as many uniform 'carrot' shapes as possible - the 'carrots' need to be about as long as the loaf tin is high. Wash out the tin, grease and flour it again, and line the base with baking paper. Then place all your carrots upside down in a straight line down the middle of the loaf pan, and stuff the sides with spare baking paper to hold them in place. Put the tin in the freezer for at least an hour.

With the rest of the mixture (you should have about three-quarters left of your original batch), sift in the cocoa, then add a little more milk to get the consistency back to a thick 'ribbon-like' consistency (it should be able to be poured or dolloped easily, but not too liquid-y).

Check the colour. Is it dark enough to look like earth? If not, add a little more cocoa and a little more milk, or use brown food colouring to get the mixture dark enough.

Take the loaf tin with the carrots out of the freezer, and remove the excess baking paper. Then pour the brown cocoa mixture around the carrots. You should have enough to just cover the tips of the carrots and fill the tin. Smooth the mixture out as well as you can and place in the oven. Bake for about 35-40 minutes, but start checking it at 25 minutes (check by sticking a skewer into the cocoa bits of the cake - if the skewer comes out clean it is ready. Be careful not to 'test' the orange carrots because obviously they are already cooked!

Leave the cake in the tin for 10-15 minutes when it comes out of the oven to allow it to firm up a little, then run a sharp knife around the edges of the tin to loosen. Carefully upend the tin into a clean teacloth, then place it upside down on a baking rack to cool. At this point, you should be able to see some orange dots or an orange stripe down the middle of the cake - these are the carrot tops showing through. Leave to cool completely. Depending on how much the cake has risen you may need to 'trim' the top of the cake, which is now sitting on the bottom - to do this, wait until the cake is completely cool, then use a very sharp bread-knife to saw through the bits you want to remove. Remember that all the parts of the cake that have risen up out of the tin will not have any 'carrots' in them, so you may wish to cut the cake back to the level of the top of the tin. When you have done this, turn it back over so that the 'bottom' of the cake becomes the top of it.

Now for the icing. Place the sugar and water in a small saucepan over a medium heat. Stir very gently foe a few seconds to make sure the sugar has dissolved, then continue heating without stirring until the mixture comes to the boil. Add the chopped chocolate and whisk or stir briskly until the chocolate melts completely. Continue to heat the mixture while stirring until it's bubbling. It needs to reach 110C (if you have a sugar thermometer) or 'thread' stage, just before 'soft ball' stage (if you don't).

To test for 'thread' stage, dip your thumb and forefinger into the iced water, then get a little mixture in a teaspoon and dip your thumb and forefinger in it, then pull them apart. If a thread forms between your fingers as you pull them apart, the mixture is ready.

As soon as the mixture is ready, pour it generously over the cake. It should be smooth, thick and glossy. The idea is to have the icing coat the entire top of the cake and cascade over the sides in generous streams. You may need to 'encourage' the mixture to flow down the sides by smoothing it gently with a spatula, to avoid the top getting too weighed down with chocolate icing!

To make the Oreo 'dirt', scrape the cream filling from the cookies and put all the cookies in a food processer. Blitz for 20 seconds or until you're happy with the size of the crumb. Then sprinkle the 'dirt' generously all over the cake and all around the base.

To make the leaves, knead the white fondant a little to soften it, then, using a latex glove on your mixing hand, mix in the green gel colouring, kneading it in until you have an even colour.

Sprinkle some cornflour on a clean surface and roll out the fondant as if it were pastry, being careful to pick it ip and turn it and add more cornflour on both sides occasionally to prevent it sticking. When it is about 1.5mm thick, use a leaf cutter to cut out leaf shapes. My cutter also embosses the leaves with veins - if yours doesn't you can mark the veins on with a small knife. Cut as many leaves as you can, remove them with a spatula and leave them to dry, then re-roll the remaining mixture to cut more leaves. Continue until you have used all the fondant.

Arrange the leaves in little clumps on top of the 'dirt garden bed' (i.e., the top of the cake). Serve immediately, or keep in an airtight container for up to four days. *This cake will last even longer if refrigerated, but take the fondant leaves off before putting it in the fridge because they will become soft and tacky. Reserve them in an airtight container at room temperature and put them back on when serving the cake. 

Savoury muffins #2: Buttermilk muffins with blue cheese, olives, tiny tomatoes and herbs

Dr Cupcake's adventures with savoury muffins continue! Last time, I searched high and low for a tasty-sounding recipe with little success, and ended up making up my own, which you'll find here. This time I adapted the recipe to fit whatever I had in my fridge - which is basically what I advised last time!

So I'll admit I went hard on the dairy products. I had buttermilk, garlic yoghurt and three different cheeses in these muffins. The 'Greek style' yoghurt in the picture is a really lovely creamy yoghurt and usually, as soon as I buy a tub, I stir it up and pour in a few tablespoons of olive oil, a few teaspoons of minced garlic, a few pinches of salt, some pepper and some fresh herbs. So it becomes a little tub of homemade tzatziki. This version is what was in my muffins.

My recipe is as pictured and is as simple and messy as it looks. There's a basic 1:1:1 on flour, eggs and dairy (yoghurt/buttermilk/milk), plus a few handfuls of whatever flavourings you want...

 ... A few of which are seen here - some creamy blue cheese torn into small squidgy bits (I used some leftover St Agur which is my favorite blue cheese), and chopped black olives...

... Plus the very last of my backyard cherry tomato harvest. They were tiny, and just starting to dry up a little, so this was a good way to use them.

....And back to the garden to fetch some herbs - chives and thyme.

It all looked both messy and a bit exciting when it was all thrown in.

I dolloped it into a muffin tin which I'd buttered beforehand. I had also cut some circles from baking paper to place in the bottom of the pans, so that they would be easier to get out.

After 20 minutes in a moderate oven they came out golden brown and smelling heavenly.

They need a generous spread of butter and can be either cut or torn up to eat. The texture was light and the muffins very savoury - the cheese and olives came through well, and the tiny cherry toms provided little juice bombs which exploded nicely in the mouth - although this wouldn't have worked with 'normal' sized cherry toms, which would be too big - these tiny ones were only the size of a pea.

Happy muffin eating from Dr Cupcake!

How to make dyed and decorated Easter eggs

Good evening and Happy Easter!

As I'm typing this on Easter Monday I wanted to share with you my first experiment in making my own hand-blown and dyed eggs for Easter.

I tried a few different techniques, with various amounts of success and failure.

Yes, I am now bombarding this blog with pictures of a little Easter egg hunt...  with dyed eggs in my garden. I loved the bright colours of these against the different plants.

Yes it's another one!

This one would have been pretty good for Valentine's Day too. I liked this technique the best.

So, the techniques: these were all new to me, because I haven't done this kind of decoration before. I do have a vague memory of doing something similar with Mum when I was really little, using some german picture transfers - I wish I could still get them because they were wonderful. But in the absence of any of those, I did what every sensible person would do: go straight to the interwebs to consult the awesomely powerful font of all culinary and decorative knowledge, MARTHA STEWART.

And of course she had about a thousand techniques and designs and tips and tricks, which you can find here. Of course she did. She's Martha Stewart.

I purchased some crayons and some decals (stickers).

You can use boiled eggs, but they don't keep indefinitely so I thought it was worthwhile to 'blow' the eggs. Now, I definitely did this as a child with Mum because I still remember how. You make a tiny pierced hole in the top of a raw egg and a slightly larger hole at the base of the egg (I used the end of a corkscrew for both) and, holding the egg firmly, blow the insides of the egg out through the hole in the base. It's a bit like blowing up a balloon - at first nothing happens, then it works!

I washed out the eggs with warm soapy water and dried the, then tried the first technique: sticking various decals or stickers on the shell of the egg in whatever patterns you want. The idea is that you then dip the egg in dye, and allow it to dry before peeling off the stickers - where they have been will stay the original shell colour (which, because I use free range eggs, is brown rather than white).

These particular pink crystal decals were so pretty that they actually would have been really nice to stick on AFTER the egg had been dyed, and leave on - I guess if you get really pretty decals you should consider this option, because this particular egg looked less impressive after they were taken off than before it was dyed!

Then, put about 20 drops of liquid food colouring (or half a teaspoon of gel colouring) into a small bowl of hot water, with a teaspoon of vinegar. Not sure why the vinegar is needed, but I consider it generally dangerous to question Martha's judgement. I used a very expensive French tarragon and white wine vinegar, not because I wanted to, but because it was the only one I had. Goddamn waste of good salad vinegar. (Note to self: buy cheap vinegar and stuff in back of larder.)

Place the egg in the bowl and sink it until fully covered. The weird glass-on-top arrangement here is because I took ages to work out how to 'sink' the egg properly, and this was my first attempt - glass on top to hold the egg down.
(Second note to self: wear latex gloves to prevent your fingers getting completely dyed blue for days.)

I kept the egg in for about 10 minutes, although you can make a lighter shade by submerging it for less time. In my case this was hard because the eggs were so brown. Using very white eggs would have given me much more shading options, but you don't want a brown egg with a slightly blue tinge - you have to get the colour deeper for it to work.

This was how the egg looked after I took it out....

And this was how it looked after the decals came off. It's still pretty, but quite subtle, and not nearly as fine and precise as I had expected. This is partly the fault of the decals - they didn't always stick firmly and evenly to the shell, so some parts of the pattern came through better than others.

I still think, in comparing these two pictures, that the egg would have been prettier had I left the decals on. A thought for next time.

This is a pic of the different eggs I was preparing - the green, purple and pink diamante patterns are all decals but the heart was drawn on with a crayon.

The crayon technique worked beautifully and I want to do more in the future. You simply draw on the eggshell with a wax crayon, then dip and dye it. When it's dry, put it in a moderate oven for 5 minutes. You'll see the wax of the crayons begin to go shiny - take out of the oven and rub gently with a cloth, the wax will come off to expose the uncoloured parts of the shell underneath.

You can do names, as in this egg, or hearts, or just lines... so many options.

It doesn't matter what colour the crayon is because you will be wiping it off - but it's better to use a darkish colour because you need to be able to see what you've drawn during the drawing process.

A closeup of the heart egg. I really liked the graininess of the crayon and the homespun look of this egg.

This is another of the decal eggs. Again the pattern came out clearly but it was less precise and fine than I expected. Not sure how to avoid this (maybe use a better quality of decals?)

I loved the strong clear designs on this. This was the egg that you can see above with the purple flower stickers on it. These nice simple shapes worked really well.

Another, different technique is to wrap your blown egg in string or raffia before dyeing - it's quite difficult to tie it on securely - then dip it for a lined effect around the centre.

This egg was wrapped in raffia and dyed dark brown:

This was the result - interesting and better than I had expected, given that the raffia could be expected to just soak up the dye and transfer it to the egg, so I wasn't sure I'd get any sort of distinct pattern.

You could do a much clearer version of this with sticky tape if it was cut into very fine lengths.

That is the end of my Easter egg dyeing odyssey - Happy Easter from Dr Cupcake!

Collingwood Football Club Cake Number Two!

Birthdays come but once a year, but even that is way too often for me, given that my boss is a mad Collingwood fan.

Last year I made him a cake with the Collingwood logo, which you can see here. This year, even though I hate Collingwood with a passion, as most sensible Australians do, I decided to revisit the theme in a slightly different way.

 I did a Collingwood guernsey together with an Aussie Rules football lying next to it.

 This is how the guernsey started out. I had made a rectangular chocolate mud cake, to my favorite ultra-rich recipe, and had ganached the surface to make it smooth.

I then looked up the interwebs for a picture of a Collingwood guernsey lying flat, to get the basic shape. As you can see in this pic, I needed only to cut three slightly curved portions from the cake for the neckline and the arm holes, and then I had to cut the tops of the shoulder-pieces at a slight angle.

After I had got the shape right, I ganached the edges I had cut to get a smooth surface and rolled out black fondant to cover the whole shape.

I haven't covered many 'shaped' cakes before, and I'm very pleased to report that the fondant - handled very carefully - stretched over the edges beautifully.

After I had covered the entire top and edges in black fondant, I cut some 1cm wide white rolled fondant stripes, being careful to try to copy the pattern carefully (i.e., the number of stripes and the relative distance of each to the other).

There is a bit of balancing between trying to follow a design exactly, and being able to simplify it so it's clear and crisp. You don't want to get bogged down in difficult detail that you won't be able to do very well, so it's best to leave out really tricky things.

In this case there were some logos on the front of the guernsey that you can see in the pic above, that I decided not to go with. Too fiddly. I did, however, cut into my black fondant for the neckpiece and placed a white half-moon piece in there for better detail.

The trusty ol' Sherrin footy was made entirely of fondant icing. I rolled it in a fabulous substance called tylose powder, which basically hardens up the fondant as you work it so that large shapes can set harder and not lose their shape.

Confession: despite watching my fair share of footy, I was about to make the ball in a brown colour, and checked at the last minute to find that Aussie Rules footballs are bright red, and have been for about 50 years. Observation fail!!

I did the 'stitching' marks in four lines with the end of a pin.

The final cake with football had the footy with its famous maker's name, 'Sherrin' printed as neatly as possible on the side.

It brought a smile to the boss's face and horror to all other opposing team supporters... Happy Birthday to Collingwood's No. 1 fan!