Chocolate Butter Cream Will Take Over The World

Meeting Eleven - Chocolate Butter Cream Will Take Over The World

Date: 9th April 2010

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Bradley, Cunnane-Neilan, Edkins. FULL HOUSE!


At the moment, we committed Cake Brigade Members are trying our darnedest to meet more often to make more exciting things.
Well, 'trying' may be an overstatement, I think we all agreed on it once in passing. But still, the sentiment was there. Thus, all members of the Cake Brigade met to make a whole host of tasty treats. After waiting for Cunnane-Neilan to finish work. And a slushie. And threat of a parking ticket. And a meal. We didn't have dessert though. Hence the baking. Stop typing, Heather.

Now, what Cake Brigade Meeting would be a Cake Brigade Meeting without a cake? This time, inspired by the multicoloured cake from last time, we made a traffic light cake, because we are three-year-old children. Zoe was in charge of this one, and it consisted of three simple sponge layers sandwiched together with chocolate butter cream.
Yes, another none chocolate item 'chocolified' with chocolate butter cream!
And yes, we realise it is the wrong way around, but the red one broke a bit. So you can just look at it upside down.


After the success of the brownie from last meeting, we decided to make it again, but left it in the oven for a teensy bit longer. Elle and Linzi took control of this. I do believe that this is the recipe they used.


I have always wanted to make fudge, because I do love it so. Therefore, Rach and I tried our hands at this chocolate and ginger fudge recipe, minus the ginger. It turned out quite well, as it was easy enough to make that me and Rach started doing this * because we had so much free time, and it didn't taste bad either.


Something we had made before, but failed to document despite how well they turned out, was Malteaser Muffins. Therefore, Elle and I teamed up to make them this time, or rather I made them and Elle told me what to do. I have to admit, the mix of this was vile smelling due to the buttermilk, and it didn't look much better, but they turned out pretty well despite Elle forgetting to add the honey. We even added smarties to them, which Elle decided to announce looked like old ladies fingernails, which was just lovely.


The final thing to be made this meeting was some good old fashioned Cake Brigade Cookies, courtesy of Linzi. This time, we shook up the recipe by making three sorts, one sort with chocolate chips, one with smarties, and the final batch with chocolate orange. I thought the chocolate orange ones were pretty darn epic, but that may just be due to the chocolate orangeness of them. I love chocolate orange.


It still blows me away when it comes to sharing out the goodies and the bill that we can make this amount of stuff for a hell of a lot less than one cake would cost you in the shops. I think home baking is the way forward.

<3 x

* I'm the one on the left. Rach is on the right, because when you have been with someone long enough, they say you start to look alike.

Taking the Stripe Cake to a Whole New Level

Meeting Ten - Taking the Stripe Cake to a Whole New Level

Date: 25th February 2010

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Bradley


After a brief sabbatical from the Brigade, we came back revived and ready to go, with more creativity and a wish to make more exciting baked goods.

Despite this, we stuck with an old favourite, chocolate chip cookies, as they have never let us down in the past, and are frankly, damn good.


Having not made the Stained Glass Biscuits at Christmas, despite having all the ingredients for them, we decided to make them now, along with some that didn't have the sweets in, using some cookies cutters that had amused Zoe when she had seen them at my house, not realising that she had got her own set. The recipe we used had called for ginger or something, but we did not put this in, and they still turned out great, so I don't think they really needed it! Zoe made this all by herself, as in this meeting, we all made things at the same time rather than working together on each item.


Linzi made this brownie from scratch. Watching it being made was like watching a heart attack waiting to happen, and it tasted the same too, which meant it was amazingly good. Even if the top did look like skin.
I stuck with another old favourite in this flapjack, as Zoe had some oats she wanted using up.


At this point, Linzi had to go, so while Zoe and Linzi were dividing up the rest of the meetings creations, I whacked the ingredients for a sponge into a mixer all at once, and then added food colouring, striping the mix in the tin to get this cool cake. It was as flat as a pancake, as expected, but look how awesome it looks!


<3 x

Christmas Edition

Meeting Nine - Christmas Edition

Date: 23rd December 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Cunnane-Neilan, Bradley.


Twas the night before Christmas Eve, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, except three randommers baking cakes.
Yeah, so I changed it a bit, you still get the idea.

This meeting was filled with Christmas cheer and creativity. We even had super cool Santa Aprons from Linzi's mum! Having googled Christmas Cakes, we set about making a Yule Tide treat fest that would even make Father Christmas proud. Or throw up, either way.

We made these Cupcakes to look like raindeers, and they turned out so well. They were just a simple chocolate cake mix, topped with chocolate butter cream, and decorated with silver balls for eyes, red Jelly Tots for noses, and set melted chocolate antlers. Obviously, the remaining Jelly Tots made our jaws hurt again. Chewing is hard work.


We then made these Santa biscuits, which were decorated with red icing and marshmallow hats, white icing beards, and silver balls for eyes. You can tell Saint Nick is an old man, and we are all for authenticity, because we even gave him cataracts. A simple operation can cure that though. Its called being eaten.


We had also planned to make some Stained Glass biscuits, but we unfortunately ran out of time.

<3 x

Birthday Brigade

Meeting Eight - Birthday Brigade

Date: 10th December 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Faulkner's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Bradley


The primary reason for this Brigade Meeting was to help Linzi make birthday cakes for her Nan and her wand-maker boyfriend, Gregorovitch.

For her Nan, she made a simple sponge, sandwiched with butter cream and decorated with writing icing and a dusting of icing sugar. Plain and simple, because old people like familiarity.


However, with Greg's cake, we were able to go more to town. True to form, we made a Stripe cake. Linzi, knowing her Greggy Boy liked jelly tots, had brought some to decorate the cake with, so Zoe and I convinced her to mix some in with the butter cream, which was much more yummy than we expected. Linzi then decorated the cake with more jelly tots and silver balls spelling out the birthday greeting. While Linzi was showing her creation to her mother, Zoe and I promptly had a contest to see who could eat the most of the remaining jelly tots, resulting in a near vomit fest and aching jaws. Lots of jelly tots are ridiculously hard on the jaws.


By this point, we had made two very delicious looking cakes that we were not able to eat, and so, feeling very sorry for ourselves, we made some flapjack. This made us feel better, along with being able to finish off the jelly tot butter cream.

<3 x

Chocoholics Anonymous

Meeting Seven - Chocoholics Anonymous

Date: 8th December 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Bradley, Faulkner


As the name suggests, this meeting was filled with chocolate based goods. I doubt this was intentional, but seeing as we are all girls in our early twenties, it is not surprising.

After the success of Jon's birthday brownie, we made another from the same sort of kit, which turned out just as well as it had done previously, as demonstrated by the fact it did not even last long enough to get taken home.


We also made some more double chocolate muffins, which turned out much better than the last batch. One even had a tongue, so we added eyes, because we thought it was amazing. Now, when we think of muffins, we think of this cute little fellow.



We are always willing to try something new, so being rather close to Christmas, we tried our hand at making truffles. They turned out quite well, despite the fact they seemed to take an age to set, and were very easy to make. We also got to use the cute mini cake cases, which is always a bonus.


After seeing a cake decorated like a clock a few meetings ago, we had all decided that it would be an amazing thing to make, but until now, we had always run out of time. however, this meeting was the perfect opportunity, as so we made this Clock Cake. As far as I remember, one layer was chocolate, and one layer was plain, of course sandwiched together with chocolate butter cream. We iced it with pink icing, decorated with large chocolate buttons and fingers for the clock hands. Ha ha, fingers for hands.


<3 x

Biscuits and Cookies

Meeting Six - Biscuits and Cookies

Date: 1st December 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base

Members: Bradley, Polson, Faulkner


Always willing to try new things, this meeting we made Melting Moments. I always used to have these at junior school at break time, so I was excited to see how these would turn out. They were quite messy to make, as you had to roll the sticky biscuit mixture in oats. I remembered that they always used to swell out really well, to become huge biscuits, and they have cherries on top which makes them even more awesome. Here is a before and after baking comparison. Yeah, they didn't spread out quite as much as I was expecting, but they were still awesome.


Using a simple recipe off the BBC Food website, we made these chocolate chip cookies, which did spread out lots! They were a nice chewie American style cookies, and this wasn't the last time we made them! You can beat a good ole favourite.


<3 x

Toffee Apples and Other Sucesses

Meeting Five - Toffee Apples and Other Sucesses

Date: 4th November 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base

Members: Bradley, Polson, Faulkner, (with guest Brigader, Mander).


Acting on a sudden desire to make toffee apples, I had started to make the caramel before everyone else had arrived. Due to this, while I was letting people in, I let the caramel burn, and thus, the Toffee Apples were a complete disaster. However, peal the toffee off, and they were lovely! Maybe, in one future Cake Brigade meeting I will try again, but alas, it was not to be this time. Not even my dad would have one, and that's saying something.


We also tried our hand at muffins for the first time this meeting. We went for a nice safe double chocolate recipe. They were nice, but not quite right, as they didn't seem to rise very well as you imagine a muffin should, so we knew that next time we would try a different recipe!


From our discovery of the stripe cake, we went on to experiment with the Spiral Cake, which was plain and chocolate cake spiraled together, and sandwiched with chocolate butter cream. We like chocolate butter cream.


Linzi then decided to melt the remaining chocolate from the muffins, and use it to decorate the cake. This was the outcome. It looks like a snail's shell!


<3 x

Halloween Edition

Meeting Four - Halloween Edition

Date: 30th October 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Faulkner's Unit Base

Members: Faulkner (partially aided by Polson)

In preparation for her Halloween party, Linzi made a whole feast of various Halloween treats for us to eat, namely Ghost and Pumpkin biscuits, which were biscuits shaped as either ghosts or pumpkins, and iced accordingly. They were epic.


She also made some chocolate butterfly cakes, filled with orange butter cream. As far as i can remember, they weren't supposed to be flavoured orange, just coloured that way, but they still tasted a bit orange-y! Isn't it weird how sometimes your mind makes things taste different because of how they look. On the other hand, maybe it was just a bit of Halloween magic.

Oh, and here is the party group.


<3 x

Playboy Bunny

Meeting Three - Playboy Bunny

Date: 5th October 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Faulkner's Unit Base

Members: Faulkner, Polson.

Linzi and Zoe met to make a birthday cake for Kim, who, incidentally, was the friend who we came up with the name 'Cake Brigade' in response to. As Kim apparently likes the playboy bunny, they shaped and decorated the cake in this shape, decorated with pink icing and silver balls. I haven't got a clue what sort of cake it was as I wasn't there, but I imagine it was a sponge with butter cream filling.

It looks amazing!


<3 x

Pokemon and the Birth of the Stripe Cake

Meeting Two - Pokemon and the Birth of the Stripe Cake

Date: 29th August 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Bradley, Edkins, Cunnane-Neilan(?).


The primary reason for this meeting was to make Rach's long suffering boyfriend, Jon, and uber cool birthday cake. We had decided to use a brownie kit to do this, as at this point, we were still unsure of our amazing skills in the kitchen. Following the instructions, we made two brownies, and put them together with chocolate butter cream in the middle. A small mishap occurred when the brownies didn't want to come out of the tins in one piece, so we took them outside and gently teased them out. We then iced the top to make it look like a Pokemon Ball, because we are the vision of cool. We dropped Rachel at Jon's, who was obviously delighted with our creation.


If memory serves, Linzi and I then went to pig out at pizza hut while Zoe was at Brownies or something before returning to continue the meeting. This may have been a completely different day, however, as I seem to remember Elle being around, but don't know where she would have gone to in the meantime.

We made another fridge cake, which was much more sickly than the last one, as well as more rocky road style cakes, and flapjack. While making a cake that I think was supposed to be a marble cake, we came up with the idea of doing it in stripes, alternating chocolate cake mix with plain cake mix. We filled it with chocolate butter cream, an saw that it was good. Thus the Stripe Cake was born.


<3 x

The Birth of The Cake Brigade

Meeting One - The Birth of The Cake Brigade

Date: 27th August 2009

Place: Cake Brigade Member Polson's Unit Base

Members: Polson, Faulkner, Bradley


The Cake Brigade started when Zoe, Linzi and myself decided one night to make a cake rather than doing the normal things people in their early twenties do. When one friend asked what we were up to via text message, we told her we were baking. She told us to save her some, to which we replied, 'No, its only for members of the Cake Brigade'. And thus, the Cake Brigade was born.

This meeting, we made a simple chocolate cake, filled and topped with chocolate butter cream and decorated with marshmallows spelling out '<3' style="text-align: left;">