Fake Posh with Randomness

Meeting 16 - Fake Posh with Randomness

Date: 23rd September 2010
Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base
Members: Bradley, Faulkner, Polson


For Edkins, the last in our trio of birthdays in September, I'll admit, we struggled to think of a suitable theme that we hadn't done already. We had three meetings to discuss this birthday, and Faulkner and I made all the decisions and planning within an hour in the early hours of the morning of the party, after we had made the cake under a completely different theme. However, the cake was still awesome, as was the party, and serves as a testament to what results when Bradley and Faulkner are left alone to make decisions for their best mate!

At the point of making the cake, the theme we had settled on was one of 'Random Mess', which entailed mixing all our previous themes together, from vegetables and farmyard animals to superheroes and the colour purple. Therefore, the cake itself was a plain sponge, which we mixed in food dye to turn it purple. As we used one large cake tin for the double mix rather than the usual two sandwich tins, it needed much longer in the oven, and so we had to keep checking on it at regular intervals rather than leaving it be. As it cooked, it turned a slightly greenish brown, which made it look more like a giant pork pie than a purple coloured cake.

For the decoration, we centered the design around an icing sheep, surrounding it with jelly bears, jelly tots, jelly snakes, chocolate buttons and marshmallows. We used chocolate butter icing to stick everything down, although the majority of it hadn't set even a week later. To finish the whole thing off, we used curly wurlys to create a tipi around the sheep.


As you can see, the cake did turn out purple, if not a little green around the edges!

As for the rest of the night, we started out all dressed up, Jon having kidnapped the birthday girl for us, and Faulkner and I played waitress as we served hors d'urves in the form of bread and butter, cheese and cucumber, mini quiches and pizzas, and cheese savoury stuffed skips. We then got Chinese and ate it off the best china, while drinking coke, sprite and fanta in wine glasses served from wine bottles. Afterwards, we got into our PJ's, and watched 'Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging' with face packs on.

For a party that didn't even have a quarter of the planning of the others due to the lack of decisiveness and Edkins' creative input, I think it went pretty darn well.

<3 x

Kid's Party

Meeting 15 - Kid's Party

Date: 15th September 2010
Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base
Members: Bradley and Edkins


Imagine the scene. Bradley is walking home feeling woozy and calls Edkins to talk to her until she gets home in case she passes out in the street. Edkins does so, and then comes round a few hours later to feed her yummy soup. Then they make an epic cake. That, children, is how dinosaurs are born.

Now, we like to push our limits sometimes, and we like it even better when we pull it off.

This dinosaur was born for Faulkner on the anniversary of her birth 23 years ago. Based on the theme of children's parties from when we were little, and of course styled after the ever awesome caterpillar cake, we made a chocolate dinosaur cake, stuck together with chocolate butter cream, topped with melted milk chocolate and decorated with flying saucers and smarties. It really was the VISION OF COOL.

Edkins and I made this cake, and I'll be honest with you, dear reader, we have been more motivated to bake. Due to this, you can imagine our surprise at how well the cakes rose and turned out with our half hearted efforts.

We made the cake in three parts, using one cake for the main body, another for the head and tail, and the remaining cake for the legs. After cutting the cakes into the desired patterns, we covered them in chocolate butter cream to prevent crumbs and help with icing, which is a little tip we picked up from a website which I forget the name of and cant be bothered to find out. We were a bit cautious at first, thinking it wouldn't help, but by jingo, it made covering the cake with the melted chocolate the day after a hell of a lot easier! We used a skewer to hold the head in place on the body, and a wedge of cake under the neck to hold the skewer in place and prevent it from slicing the head in half. Now you know what killed off the dinosaurs. They didn't have cake wedges to hold their heads together.

We coated the pieced together cake in a generous layer of melted chocolate, and then lined the spine with flying saucers and dotted the back with smarties to make it a greater spotted chocosaurus.


We then proceeded to playing waiting for Faulkner to come home, treasure hunts, three legged races, egg and spoon races, throwing egg competitions, pin the nose on the clown, speed eating jelly and other such hilarity.

A good time was had by all.

<3 x

Vintage Tea Party

Meeting 14 - Vintage Tea Party

Date: 12th September 2010
Place: Cake Brigade Member Faulkner's Unit Base
Members: Bradley, Polson, Faulkner, Edkins and Mander



So, its uh, been a while. Umm, so how are you? Kids doing well? Uh ... yeah.

Just because the blog went AWOL for a few months, doesn't mean that we didn't bake, oh no! September is a busy month for us of the Cake Brigade, with three of the 'Zante Six' having birthdays within two weeks of each other. Inspired by a walk in the woods during near torrential rain, we decided to make SURPRISE the theme of the birthdays this year.
The first of these birthdays was Cunnane-Neilan's, and being the first, she got the majority of the crazy ideas, namely kidnapping. Yes, we kidnapped her. bundled her into a car filled with sunglassed suits and blindfolded her before taking her to an undisclosed location, where there was a vintage style tea party waiting for her. It was lovely.
But first, we had to make the cakes! We decided that rather than one large cake, we would make her lots of cupcakes. Lots of cupcakes. So, to do this, we headed to Faulkner's, all Cake Brigaders minus Neilan in tow, and set about making probably close to 100 cakes, both plain and chocolate. We topped them with pink or blue coloured buttericing for the ones going on the cake stand, and cut out letters in royal icing spelling 'Happy 23rd Birthday Elle' or words to that effect for the birthday cakes.

You could tell who had iced which cakes by the amount of icing on them, as Edkins seemed to think that each cake had to be as high as Mount Everest to be acceptable. The rest of us were far more stingy.

Now, I am an idiot and neglected to take any photos of our creations, so unless someone wants to send some to me (hint hint), you'll have to cope with this one solitary photo that I have managed to steal off Twitter.

Edit: Faulkner, you are awesome personified.

<3 x

Had to stop myself from adding my footnotes then ...