Bonfire Night Cake

I was chatting recently about autumn celebrations with Han, part time Creative Director (unpaid) at Cake Poppins. We agreed that in our day, by which I mean the late 70s, the real autumn celebration was not the US style trick or treating for Hallowe’en, but Guy Fawkes’ Night on 5 November.

Historically, bonfires have been lit on this day since 1605 to celebrate the failure of a Catholic plot to assassinate the Protestant King and became a focal point for religious divides. By the 1970s, it was the night when your dad was sent to the bottom of the garden with a box of fireworks while you played with a sparkler.

Here is a photo of me and Lucy wearing matching bobble hats knitted by my mum. Note that even on a night in early November, we are wearing short skirts with bare legs. People often wonder how Geordies brave the cold on a night out. It’s simple – we start training at an early age.

The cake itself is chocolate hazelnut baked with fresh raspberries and covered with chocolate hazelnut ganache. Last month I did a course at Cakes4Fun and a tutor told us about a wedding cake he’d made, replacing some of the flour with ground hazelnuts, adding raspberries and mixing Nutella into the ganache. There is something magical about listening to a very handsome man telling you about a lovely cake and I highly recommend the experience. If you can’t get to Cakes4Fun, why not print off and laminate a recipe, find someone absolutely scrummy in the street and ask him to read it out.

Anyway I thought I’d give it a go (the baking, not the laminating) and the cake turned out a treat. I have some of the Nutella ganache left over and plan to roll it in chopped hazelnuts to make truffles. So what if I got on the scales the other morning to see the message “Err”.

I have erred and strayed like a lost ox

The cake is decorated with milk chocolate cigarellos but you could use Matchmakers, preferably the orange ones because they are the tastiest. The guy is just a guy – some towns make an effigy of a hate figure  for their bonfire but I don’t hate anyone enough to want to burn them alive. He is, however, sitting on a cigarello, so he’s not even comfortable for his impending death. The leaves are cut with a little ivy cutter, which I hoped would pass as maple, and there is a little hedgehog escaping as a reminder to CHECK UNLIT BONFIRES for animals. The cold might be God’s way of telling us to burn more Catholics, but there’s no reason to burn their pussycats as well.

I’m afraid the opportunity to pepper this blog with quotes from Blackadder has been too tempting to resist. There’s a shiny sixpence for anyone who can spot all seven. This competition is not open to employees or members of their immediate families. Unpaid or otherwise. 

Wedding cake with fresh flowers

This weekend I did a two day course making an open stack wedding cake with fresh flowers at Cakes4Fun.

The first day was spent cutting and covering the cakes with Jen, a lovely instructor whose advice is always in my head when I’m doing cakes. On the second day we were joined by Patty, a florist with an infectious enthusiasm for both flowers and cake. I felt that I learned a huge amount from her about taping and wiring flowers, about how to use them on a cake, which flowers wilt or cause others to wilt, which are toxic and which are edible. I felt the tingle of a possible new hobby coming on and I swear I felt my credit card wince.

Jen showed us how to dowel and stack the cakes leaving a scary two inches of air in between the bottom two layers, something I have never done before. The space was filled with red and cherry brandy roses, salal leaves, rosehips, Chinese lanterns and plants I’d never even heard of like amaranthus and kangaroo paw (hilariously misheard as kangaroo poo). We also included some bird eye chillies on the wedding cake, which my mum suggested would make for a “hot night”. Ridiculous. Who would cook a curry on their wedding night?

The reds and oranges of the flowers and berries looked stunning and everyone was pleased with their cakes.

 I wish my rear view was this good

This was a really lovely course – I learned a lot about flowers, gained confidence in using them on a cake and am very keen to learn more. Plus I now have 100 wedding cake portions to eat on my own like a jilted bride.

Huge thanks to Petra and Dylan for having me to stay and credit to Dylan for his persistence in trying all week to eat the circus cake. Thanks also to the taxi driver who picked me up from Petra’s and asked if she was my daughter. She is TWO MONTHS younger than me for god’s sake. Perhaps it’s time to get some rest.

Five days, five cakes

This week I did the PME Sugarpaste five day course at Cakes4Fun. As ever, our instructors were great: Liz, a walking manual of cake making tips who has most of Blackadder committed to memory; and Lisa, who graduated from Cordon Bleu with an even higher grade than a well known cake designer. I won't name names, but I'll drop in a clue. Please call me on a premium rate number to see if you guessed correctly.

On Monday we made a cake with broderie anglaise, which reminds me of high tea with my great aunts and their beautiful hand-embroidered tablecloths. Petra and I have enjoyed eating it.

We also made a handbag cake and a Barbie cake.

Barbie cakes are a bit of a love/hate thing, generally on a sliding scale commensurate with your age. Lucy commented that Barbie looked a bit tarty. She should have seen her when she had her arms in the air getting her boobs smeared with Trex. 

Thursday was a circus cake, my favourite design of the week, and we finished the course with a three tier cake.

This was the third and final week of my PME Professional Diploma and I am eagerly awaiting my certificate in the post. I hope it's made of pastillage and decorated in royal icing.

There's been a lot of discussion in the classes about the order in which the three weeks should be done. I don’t think it really matters as each week covers different techniques but I would suggest starting with Sugar Paste, then Royal Icing, then Sugar Flowers.

I celebrated graduation with a trip to Peggy Porschen, a well known cake designer who did really well at Cordon Bleu, but...  I had a cup of tea, a salted caramel cupcake and a gawp at the beautiful wedding cakes.

I also popped into the Buckingham Palace gift shop and bought my mum this delightful Christmas bauble. The Queen paints them herself with real gold, which explains why they are so expensive. 

I can wholeheartedly recommend the courses at Cakes4Fun. All ingredients and equipment are provided so there's no need to lug half your kitchen with you; the class sizes are small at no more than eight; the tutors are very knowledgeable and friendly; it’s fun and I’ve eaten my own body weight in cake this week. 

Lastly, the weather: it has been red hot all week. Today is the first day of October and it was 28 degrees Celsius. If God is reading (he's bound to be), please can we have summer during summertime next year? 

Highbury Fields. Scorchio!

Sugar Flowers

This week I did the five day PME course in Sugar Flowers at Cakes4Fun, which is a mere 150 metres from this house

If you’re in your 30s and as a child watched BBC while eating your tea, you will probably recognise the bowler-hatted man coming out of 52 Festive Road. Putney was home to the man who created Mr Benn. When the humble bank clerk wasn’t solving problems for dragons or elephants or cavemen, he lived just round the corner from Cakes4Fun and is commemorated on a paving stone outside the original house. This thrills me out of all proportion.

Once again, the other ladies on the course had come from all over the world – Budapest, Johannesburg, Dubai, Arizona – so my journey from Newcastle seemed neglible.


My knowledge of flowers is minimal and stretches as far as “red ones, white ones, yellow ones” so I had plenty-plenty to learn. Monday was a gentle start making a plaque with non-wired flowers.

Work started in earnest the next day with a woodland bouquet using the pulled flower method. I finally found out a) what the holes in a celpad are for (Mexican hats), b) what the mysterious little celpad stick is for (Mexican hats) and c) what a Mexican hat is.  The pulled flower method had the highest casualty rate and it was a lot of work to create a small bouquet. I love the blackberries.

The next three days covered wired flowers – open rose; lilies and orchids; and a bridal bouquet.

At the end of each day spent cutting, veining, wiring and dusting petals comes the heartbreak of binding, when you have to say goodbye to some petals that break or don’t stay on the wire. It’s sad to spend so much effort creating a beautiful petal that in the end doesn’t make the final cut. Like spending years raising a child only to have him support Sunderland. The back up plan, apart from having lots of children and dressing them in black and white, is to make lots of spare petals for the reserve bench.


My favourite flowers in the bridal bouquet are the apple blossom and Sweet Williams. Kate Middleton included Sweet Williams in her bridal bouquet and the flowers were renamed Prince Williams in our class. My own William is sweet as a little pie and it turns out that Mr Benn's first name was William.

Sweet Williams

Sugar flowers demand concentration and it was surprisingly tiring work. Luckily we were kept energised with a constant supply of delicious cakes, cake pops and cookies.

I had a great time on the course, met some lovely people and felt that I learned a lot. Making sugar flowers taught me to open my eyes and look closely at a flower with all its idiosyncracies in the hope of recreating it in sugar. 

In other London news:

Helen and her fellow illustration graduates put on a successful exhibition at the Coningsby gallery and I bought three more pictures of cats for my pension plan office wall. I mentioned Helen’s work here and am very proud to say that, having graduated this summer with a first class degree in Illustration, she already has a contract to publish her first children’s book in spring.

Annabel is becoming increasingly addicted to courses at Cakes4Fun. Having got her hooked with the soft stuff (“go on, try a cupcake course or a cakepop lesson, you'll like it”) she’s rapidly moved onto the harder fixes of stacking tiered cakes and today has made this beautiful butterfly cake. The bag of chocolate truffles she made at an evening class was excellent company on the train home.

I had a lovely time staying with Petra and Dylan, both of whom celebrate a birthday this week.

STILL in our 30s

Petra had a birthday dinner with friends and Dylan is celebrating his first birthday today by holding a soiree for his two best friends Rico and Cookie. I’ve said it before, those London doggies live the life. Happy birthday, handsome!

Macarons – the fickle boyfriend of the confectionery world

This week I attended Cakes4Fun's inaugural macaroon class. I'd hummed and hah'd about the wisdom of going to London during the riots, but decided that the threat of violence and arson wasn't going to come between me and cake.

For the avoidance of doubt, macaroons here mean little pastel-coloured almond meringues. They are not the coconut haystacks we used to eat in the 70s, nor are they the chocolate and coconut bar of fondant inexplicably popular in Scotland. These are, in truth, macarons. Han has done some research and tells me they should apparently be called macarons a) so that people don't expect a coconut bun with a cherry on top and b) to make them sound posher.

I love macarons (see, I sound posh already!) but they're a rare treat as they are prohibitively expensive. I'd never baked them because I'd heard they were tricky with a 50 per cent failure rate and frankly I can't cope with that kind of rejection. Not from a biscuit. So when Cakes4Fun announced a macaroon course I jumped at the chance to learn from the experts.

The instructor was Lisa, a lovely American lady who is a treasure trove of baking knowledge and a petite ball of energy. If Michael Bublé is reading and he's tired of that Argentinian model and wants more cake in his life, Lisa is the girl for you. (I've done my best, Lisa, the rest is up to you).

We worked in pairs. Excitingly, one of the places on the course had been purchased by a man, a creature rare as hens' teeth at Cakes4Fun. Even more excitingly, he was going to be pairing up with me. He never showed up. Perhaps he’d heard how over-excited I get.

We made two different types of batter using cooked and uncooked sugar. The cooked sugar method – Italian meringue - is more tricky but makes a smooth shiny macaroon that is slightly chewy in the middle. The uncooked sugar method – French meringue – is easier but makes a more brittle macaroon that has a rougher shell. For taste and appearance, the smooth Italian beat his pimply French cousin hands down.

Once the macaroons had been baked in pretty pastel colours, the next step was matchmaking. This is as frustrating as it is in real life. At first glance, the macaroons all look like they’d get on famously, but start pairing them up and you quickly realise that some are too big, too small, too oval or too cracked to make a real go of a steady relationship. But by and large there is the perfect match for every macaroon and that special bond can be cemented with jam, buttercream or ganache.

Lemon, pistachio, chocolate and raspberry.
Note to self: do not get drunk on the train home and let a Scottish family eat all the raspberry ones.

I’ll be honest - some macaroons didn’t bake properly. Some never found their other half. Some were simply not ready to commit. But all was not lost – as Hello! magazine would put it, the forsaken macaroons can find “the happiness of new love” in another dessert, perhaps crushed over ice cream or inside that king of puddings, Eton Mess.

I loved the macaroon course and am certainly going to try them at home, aiming to recreate Lisa’s perfect macaroon with little “feet”. 

In this photo you can see the macaron's "feet". Jeez, some people talk about cakes as if they're human.

I was given Jose Maréchal’s book "Secret of Macarons" for my birthday and am going to try some new flavours, starting with Mr Salted Caramel. I’ve had my eye on him for some time and I think it’s time to make my move.

Carousel Cake

I've been wanting to make a carousel cake ever since I bought a PME rocking horse cutter in January. This week I found several excuses to do so:

• it was my birthday on Tuesday and I could see no reason not to celebrate turning 39 by making myself a cake better suited to a small child.
• Renshaw have just brought out new regal icing colours including ruby red and my favourite duck egg blue and I was keen to try them.
• Wednesday saw the first Clandestine Cake Club in Newcastle with cakes themed as childhood summer memories (for all the summery cakes, see here).
• my alma mater Cakes4Fun are running a competition entitled 'What Summer Means to Me' that I wanted to enter. For me, summer is a travelling fair and here is why. 

New York has Central Park, London has Hyde Park and Newcastle upon Tyne has the Town Moor, home to a couple of hundred cows and little else. At the end of June every year since 1882 the cows clear off to Benidorm on a cheap 10 night deal while the moor hosts one of Europe's largest travelling fairs, the Hoppings. This short video neatly shows the contrast.

As a child the most exciting day in the year for me after Christmas was the day I went to the Hoppings. I remember almost levitating with excitement as we approached the rides. The smell of chip fat and candy floss blended with diesel generators and the throaty thud of pop music still plucks at my heart. I remember the time it was so wet when I was 7 that the mud came over the top of my wellies (I was undeterred - nothing kept me off a waltzer); the time aged 10 that me and my cousin slipped the safety bar inside an American Egg and rattled about inside it like a couple of tictacs; and the time we lost Yvonne inside the helter skelter on my 6th birthday trip and I loudly suggested that she'd been stolen by the gypsies, just as our mothers had warned.

Here's me 35 years ago by the dodgems sporting a little dress and hat that my mum had sewn.

Last year, Caroline and I took her girls Hannah and Becca to the fair and they loved it.

So my summertime theme was a fairground ride. I tried to tone down the out and out kitsch of a carousel horse but kept the mirrors, the gold and the garlands of flowers around the horses' necks. 

The cake could  even go round and round and I made a three second video of my cousin Helen moving the turntable of it springing into life. Watch here and be amazed!

After ten days of Hoppings fun, the rides are dismantled, the travellers move on and the cows come home with as much duty free as they could buy. In much the same way, my cake was dismantled. It didn't have far to travel and there was still some left for breakfast.

Wedding cake

My family has been in a state of high excitement as we've celebrated the first family wedding in ten years. My sister Lucy became Mrs Mark Wright at the weekend and we are all delighted.

I set about making the cake several weeks ago, baking a 12 inch fruit cake that would have time to mature. I forgot to make a wish when I mixed it, unless you count "I hope I get a slice". I was more careful with the next two tiers - chocolate orange, then lemon - and took requests. Lucy suggested a win on the lottery, my mum hoped for a baby girl, and I plumped for health, happiness, holidays and a kitten.

Lucy had asked for a plain white iced cake with pink ribbon and wedding toppers of her, Mark and baby Alex. This sounds simple but plain is hard to do - there are no flowers or decoration to patch up uneven covering. 

I made the wedding toppers referring to the notes I'd made at Cakes4Fun when Pen taught us modelling, chuckling at the instruction "make groom's trousers HIGH for support. Think Simon Cowell". I attached Alex to Mark's lap by sliding a piece of spaghetti into his stomach, completing hiding the waistcoat I'd carefully embossed and shimmered. The naked lump behind him is the bride's torso waiting for its dress. When I attached the toppers to the cake on the wedding day and turned the bride upside down to apply glue, she had a shamefully bare flesh-coloured bottom. I felt that I should have made some bridal pantaloons.

While I'm on the subject of flesh: when I was seven, I had a set of crayons with names like 'poppy red' and 'ocean blue'. Even in the late 70s, it was becoming unfashionable to describe the beige-y pink as 'flesh' and it was renamed 'salmon pink' as the crayon world woke up to the fact that beige-y pink is not the flesh tone for everyone. Yet in the 21st century world of modelling paste, I'm surprised to find this colour is still referred to as 'flesh'. Perhaps because it's the base for other skin tones too, or perhaps they're just a big bunch of racialists.

I carefully copied the belt design on Lucy's wedding dress, then cursed myself as I covered most of it up with the bouquet. The last thing to add was the hair, for which I used a craft gun and a slimy mix of brown sugar paste and Trex. It goes into the gun in a slippery brown sausage that looks disgusting. Having carefully modelled tiny little ears on the bride, I cursed myself again that I was about to cover them completely with hair, and toyed with the idea of leaving a bit of ear poking out between the locks of hair, an effect known in my family as 'monkey ear' and utterly reviled. I have done many horrible things to my sister over the years, from trying to convince her that she was growing a moustache when she was 12 (she wasn't) to telling her and her friends during school lunch break that the kitchen freezer had broken and they were giving away all the ice creams (they weren't). However, giving her monkey ear on her wedding cake would have been a step too far. The ears were covered up.

I stacked the cake on the wedding day at Bramall Hall, a beautiful Tudor building set in its own park, and the cake sat on a Jacobean dresser carved with wooden foxes.

The ceremony was beautiful, though the bride and groom were each flanked by a man with a noose around his neck. 

If there was a hidden warning, Mark chose to ignore it and happily signed the register, watched over by a small toy owl nestling on a light fitting.

The official photographer Sam Ryley made sure that the photographs were fun to do and very kindly took this photo of me, the cake, and Lucy reflected in the mirror. I like it and so must our mother, who described it as "a good photo of a scrawny lady. No offence intended". I hope she enjoys the official wedding portraits just as much.

We had a lovely wedding breakfast; the speeches were funny, the cake was cut and the first dance was danced. It was a very happy occasion. I got my wish for a slice of fruit cake twice over and I hope that Lucy and Mark get all their wedding wishes too - health, happiness, perhaps someone I can buy cute little dresses for, and a kitten. Possibly twice over.

Royal love birds

Ha! I left the word 'icing' out of the title to trick you into reading my blog. You thought you'd get a lovely read about Kate and Wills and a photo of them smiling like saints, but instead you've got the first module (royal icing) of my PME diploma. Well you're here now, so let's get cracking.

I did the course at Cakes4Fun, a place that does exactly what it says on the tin: they make cakes and it's a lot of fun.

There were eight ladies on the course (for the avoidance of doubt, I'm counting myself as a lady) and as usual they'd come from so far away that my journey from Newcastle seemed like a hop, skip and a jump. One had come from Germany, another from Switzerland. Her husband works for Nestle and gets to bring home free chocolate. She must REALLY love him.

We made two cakes, which in truth were polystyrene dummies.

They look just the same as cake but don't taste quite as good. The first cake was covered with royal icing, a laborious process that takes several days of smoothing on fine layers of icing, leaving them to dry for hours, sanding them and then adding another layer. It's called royal icing because it's a royal pain in the chuff. It is a technique that's taught in the same way that trainee hairdressers learn to do a perm, something you need to know but will never need to do.  No one asks for a cake covered in royal icing because a) it is time consuming and therefore expensive and b) they've invented sugarpaste. Mercifully it was sugar paste that we used to cover the stacked four tier cake.

Once the cakes were covered, the fun began and we learned some royal icing piping techniques that we definitely will use again because they're so pretty.

Broderie anglaise love birds. GET A ROOM!

Lace and snail trail 

Brushed embroidery

Bridge and extension work. The birdcage represents the claustrophobic trap of marriage something pretty 

Scrolls and piped flowers (on top)

We looked at some great books on royal icing. I have a current embargo on buying more cake books but it's my birthday next month IT'S MY BIRTHDAY NEXT MONTH so I've added some to my Amazon wishlist, please and thank you very much.

We were covering dummy cakes but there was a ready supply of real cake from the kitchen. These are people who take a real pride in their cake and happily take time to pipe ganache and add sprinkles onto a mid morning snack. Here are just some of the treats we had:

I had a great time on the course, met some lovely people and learned a huge amount in a week. I'm very much looking forward to modules 2 and 3 in September, as well as a macaroon class in August.

In a brief round up of other London news:

• Monday: a comedy hero described my cakepops as ' like little cakes on a stick' (just as well he steers clear of observational comedy). 
• Tuesday: the tapas at Elaine's King William pub in Hampstead is delicious as ever
• Wednesday: Dylan has had his first hair cut

• Thursday: Taste Festival London charges £22 entrance (it can taste right off)
• Friday: the Turkish food at Tas is still fantastic

As I packed my case on Saturday morning, I laughed at my optimistic inclusion of a sunhat and sunglasses lying unused at the bottom of the case, shook out my umbrella and headed for Manchester.