Culinary Creativity

Meeting 18 - Culinary Creativity

Date: 2nd December 2010
Place: Cake Brigade Member Bradley's Unit Base
Members: Bradley, Faulkner, Palmer


You may remember how a few posts ago, I mentioned how we were bored of always making the same things. Which is true, as without anything to challenge us, we have lacked the ambition to brigade over the past few months. However, following my discovery of this and this, we found some inspiration, and gave our newest cake brigade member; Member Palmer, a baptism of fire.


As you can imagine, even though the Rainbow Cake is a simple enough thing to bake, it look time. We had to bake 6 cakes of different colours, and allow them all to cool completely before we could frost it. To begin with, we struggled with the colourings, as it is hard to tell what colour the cake will bake to and we didn't want any of the layers to be too similar. We needed it to stand out; to look as vibrant as possible without the amount of food dye compromising the density of the cake itself. The most problematic layer was the orange, but in the end, they all turned out well. We left the cake to cool overnight, and then I frosted it with a ridiculous amount of chocolate butter cream. Originally, we had be unsure about using a dark frosting as it might dull the effect of the coloured layers, but chocolate butter cream being the most tasty, there really wasn't much else we could do, so in the end we had no choice but to submit to the chocolaty goodness.


Here follows some animated GIFs. Yeah, they're cool.

For the Cupcake Stuffed Cupcakes, we first made mini plain cupcakes, and left them to cool before we frosted them with chocolate butter cream (what else). We then made the batter according to the recipe linked earlier, and filled the normal cupcake cases with the mix, squishing in a mini cake and covering with more batter. Originally, we had planned to do cupcake stuffed cupcakes stuffed with cupcakes, but had to reign ourselves in when we realised it was quite late, and so our muffin cases went unused.

In theory, they worked well; they are, after all, cupcakes stuffed with cupcakes. However, the batter did spread somewhat during baking, and the outer cupcake layer was quite thin, so it may have been better if we had used the mini cakes to stuff the muffin sized cakes rather than the ordinary sized ones.

No GIFs this time, you can have normal pictures.

<# 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 ...