Tonight i used Frances Quinns new book!

The other day i saw Quinntessential Baking on sale on amazon for £12 so i thought, that'll do me thank you! It came yesterday but i never got a chance to look at it til tonight. It's bloody brilliant!!

She shows you how to make owls out of brownie!!!

However, tonight i opted to use some golden syrup i bought and never got round up opening, and made her salted caramel sauce and honeycomb.

If you've read previous posts, you'll know my last attempt of honeycomb was a bloody disaster. I nearly had to throw out a le creuset dish (it was a gift, i could never bring myself to spend near £100 on a baking dish! ) and almost burnt everyone.

So i was anxious.

But! I persevered and followed the instructions and... It only went and bloody worked! How chuffed was I!?!?  Especially as I'm not quite sure what colour 'golden amber ' is meant to be (that was the colour the syrup and sugar mix had to be before i added the cream to the sauce and the bicarb to the honeycomb).

But it worked!!!

But i didn't stop there, oh no no no!! Andrew had a pal round to watch the nfl so i thought fuck it ill make some cakes! And fill them with sauce and honeycomb!
Amazing!!!

To be fair, the only reason i done this tonight was because I've left my dot to dot books at work and i had to do something else instead!

So there you go! See you later :-)

Yesterday i made a birthday cake... machine gun!

A few weeks ago i made a giant fondant fancy and it went down a storm. I was right proud. Then one of the secretaries at my work asked if I'd make her son a birthday cake for his 9th birthday.  Bring it on, i said. I told her to find out what he wanted and get back to me.

I didn't expect him to request a fucking machine gun!

But!!! Being the ambitious idiot that i am, i said yep! No probs Yvonne! I'm on it!

Then i Googled machine gun. Fucking hell! My initial thoughts of making some sort of weapon he could pick up and pretend to shoot folk with went right out the window. (How cool would that be though).  But it could obviously be done - albeit by professional bakers - so i was on it like a car bonnet.

First i tried to copy a pic from Google,  then took measurements and timesed it by 10. This had to feed at least 20 folk! I ended up with a template that i could cut the cake from. It worked :-)

So,  on monday night i got going. I found a recipe for a 11" x 11" cake online - 320g of flour, sugar and butter then 5 eggs and a teaspoon of baking powder in case you were wondering- and used my mum's old baking tin. And made 2. That's a lot of eggs! My wee food bin got emptied twice last night!

While they were cooling i got down with the butter icing. Yvonnes son wanted jam and cream in the middle so he got what was left of my rasp jam (tesco finest dontcha know) and the cream. Then it was time to carve.

Well. I've never been so nervous in my life! I've never made a carved cake before, let alone one that uses 8lb of cake and is for a 9 year old boy!

I started with the shoulder bit and that went ok. And i got some confidence.

(I should tell you at this point that the cake tray was in fact a cut out cardboard box that Yvonne and i stole from work (thankfully we don't work on the general wards as it would have been a urinary incontinence pad box and i might have had to paint it to save 9- year old embarrassment! !!). I covered it in cling film and tin foil and put it on the floor, as it didn't fit anywhere else!!)

So i carved. And i jammed. And iced. And constructed. And it looked fucking awesome! Then i iced more over the top of it all and got cracking on my fondant icing.

I'd found black icing online so bought some, which was fine. But i still had to make a different colour that i realised the gun was comprised of. I wanted to go for brown but ended up with a strange human flesh colour by mixing yellow,pink and green! I'm not sure what i thought I'd get but it was a nice wee surprise!

Rolling fondant is hard when 1) you don't have many surfaces, 2) you don't have much icing sugar to flour the workspace you DO have and 3) you really haven't a fucking clue what you're doing!  But i got there!

And it was awesome!

I decorated the cake with wee silver edible balls to look like screws and finally made a wee black fondant Craig. As that was his name. I wanted to do the whole "happy birthday" text,  but by that time id been at it for 5 hours and was bloody knackered!

So today i took it to work (so Yvonne could take it home for his birthday tomorrow) and got a tremendous reception.

I don't think I've been so proud of anything for a long time!!!

So now I've agreed to make a boat for our consultant psychiatrist who's leaving soon, and a birthday cake- as yet unspecified - for one of our psychologists!!

Bring it on :-)