The Wedding Cake

Photo by Paul Summerfield

The cake, like my flowers, was another thing I didn't want to spend too much money on. So I turned to the best baker I know. My Mum. Does she now wish I had gone a different route to save her the stress? Probably. But I think it turned out great.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

We wanted a simple, two tiered cake with layers of jam and butter cream inside, covered in a thin layer of butter cream and decorated with berries. And the top layer had to be gluten-free.
My Mum definitely delivered!

She found the cake stand at my Grandad's house and her friend Debra lent us her fancy knife from Liberty. The two of them, with my sister, successfully got the cake to the venue on the morning of the wedding and got it assembled and decorated, all while I was still at home getting my hair done.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

For the cake topper I knew I wanted one of the phrase ones in a fancy font. Andrew and I settled on it saying 'You're my favourite' which is something we say to each other a lot. Because we're adorable!
I used my Cricut to cut out the words from card and glued a wooden kebab skewer to the back. Then I sprayed it gold.

Photo by Paul Summerfield

I am so pleased with how the cake turned out. It looked legit! Though my Mum has said she won't be applying for Bake Off any time soon.

Oh, and it tasted delicious too!

As a memento of the day I took the cake topper, removed the stick and stuck the words to the front of the mount in this frame. I added some paper which matches the colour scheme of our living room and added the frame to our gallery wall. I like how it's a subtle reminder of our day rather than something that screams, 'we had a wedding!'

Banana Muffins

My friends and I always buy too much food for things like picnic lunches, and shopping for Centre Parcs was no different. I ended up taking home the leftover, well travelled, bananas only to find that my parents already had a lot of bananas at home.

There was only one thing for it.

Banana muffins.

I used this recipe which I followed exactly, except for adding some mixed spice for an extra flavour. I left them in for exactly 30 minutes so the top has a nice crust.

I added sultanas to the last few just to try it out and they're a good addition so next time I'll add them to the main batter.

What do you do to use up brown bananas?

Any good banana bread recipes around?

Courgette Cake

My parents like to grow courgettes in the garden.

Then they like to go on holiday and leave me to look after them.

This year I didn't forget about them and then find some were way over a foot long.

I picked one at the appropriate size, I think. I'm not actually sure if this is a good size because I don't like courgettes all that much which is why I decided to make cake with it!

I'd never tried this recipe before, but I have eaten the cakes that my Mum's made with it and I think I did a pretty good job.

(This recipe is from somewhere on the internet but I've just typed out the printed copy we have)

Ingredients:

60g raisins

250g courgettes [2 or 3] weighed before grating 

(I've just properly read this bit. My one courgette was something like 340g before grating. Once I'd grated it and strained the excess water it was exactly 250g. Oh well, extra courgette!)

2 large eggs

125ml vegetable oil

150g caster sugar

225g self-raising flour

1/2 tsp bicarbonate of soda.

1/2 tsp baking powder

Oven 180c/Gas Mark 4

1) Grate courgettes and remove excess water with a sieve.

2) Cream eggs, oil and sugar together.

3) Add flour, bicard and baking powder.

4) Stir in courgette and raisins.

5) Bake for 30 minutes as a whole cake or cupcakes.

I made 12 muffins and put the rest of the mixture in a loaf tin.

They taste good guys, nothing like courgettes, and you can legitimately eat more of them because there's a vegetable in them.

Gotta get that 5 a day somehow.

Grand Ole Lisa

Today is my birthday!

And this is my birthday cake.

It should really say 'Grand Ole Lisa' cos, 23, yikes! Haha.

Something Nashville/country related was definitely a top option for this years birthday cake because I still love country music, this year I watched the first season of Nashville pointing out all the places I'd been, and I still start sentences with, 'When I was in Nashville...' even though it was September that I went there.

The main cake is a Victoria sponge covered in fondant icing with the Grand Ole Opry logo on it.

Cutting out letters is not easy. I printed out the logo, cut out all the letters and lay them on top of the icing then cut around them with a knife. I stuck them on the main cake with jam.

The cupcakes around the main cake represent the circle of stage that was taken from the original home of the Grand Ole Opry and put into the stage of the new place so everybody would be standing on the same floor.

I made the candles into the iconic mic stands using paper with the words printed on.

See my previous birthday cakes here, here, here and here!

Bran Cake

I'm a bran fan but it gets all up in my braces too much for me to eat it for breakfast.

#realtalk

So I had to come up with another way to use up the box of bran flakes that had been abandoned in the cereal cupboard.

My first thought is always cake so I googled bran flake cake recipes and came across this one on the NHS Change4Life website.

The first thing you have to do is put bran flakes and dried fruit in a bowl and add milk, so this recipe is basically breakfast in a cake.

The recipe calls for mashed bananas, apricots and sultanas. I decided to use sultanas, raisins and glace cherries instead because I don't like apricots and I find things don't last as long if they have banana in them.

This cake tastes healthy, which isn't a bad thing.

The addition of dried fruits makes all the difference, so it'd be interesting to try the recipe again with different combinations.

I've also found recipes for a chocolate bran cake and carrot cake bran muffins so I might try those to use up the rest of the box.

Cake and Card

It was my Mum's birthday last week and in addition to getting her a present I also made her a cake and a card.

For the card a roughly drew a flower and then cut out all the parts with a scalpel.

I put a piece of coloured paper on the inside to highlight the cut-outs.

The cake was a standard Victoria sponge.

To decorate the top I tried putting a plastic doily on the cake and sifting icing sugar over it.

It kind of work, but I piped on some extra icing just to define the pattern.

And I put the cake on our 'I love you Mummy' plate.

Oh yes.

Paint, Cake, and Lady A

Today I wanted to share this new painting that I completed.

I haven't done much painting recently and when I have it's been landscapes so I thought I'd sharpen up the portraiture skills.

The canvas I used originally looked like this. Urgh.

A painting from many years ago that I gave up on because it was just not going well.

(Sorry to Laura and Lizzi for making you look like disfigured zombies)

A couple of coats of white emulsion later and the canvas was good to go for a second round.

Now do you guys want to know what I did for my birthday?

I went to see Lady Antebellum in London with my sister!!!

The tickets were a birthday gift from my parents.

They were soooo good!

It was a great night.

I love this photo I took of Charles. That man knows how to belt out a tune!

Incase you were wondering; my birthday cake tasted delicious.

Here it is all lit up. Yes, there are 22 candles on it.

And speaking of cake, my friend Stef got me 6 cupcakes from Hummingbird Bakery.

(I may have not been able to wait until my camera battery charged to take a photo of them before I tried one)

And I finally got to try a red velvet cake that the blogosphere raves about. Pretty darn good!

There are two red velvet and four vanilla, and that icing is sa-weeet!

The prettiest cake I ever did make

And by make, I mean decorate.

My Mum made the cake and I decorated it.

That's how we roll when it comes to birthday cakes.

That's right; today is my birthday and this is my birthday cake!

For my birthday last year my housemates got me a giant cupcake silicon mould and I've finally got around to using it.

Lots of people online have said that they had to do a few trial cakes with this mould, as the instructions aren't very helpful when it comes to cake batter quantities. But my Mum got it right first time. She's a baking pro.

Although, we haven't eaten it yet, but I trust my Mum's cooking skillz.

I went for super cute when decorating this cake so there's a pink ribbon, fondant buttons, and pink and white sugar balls and hearts.

To see my previous birthday cakes click here, here and here.

And I highly recommend that you do, cos I have had some pretty awesome cakes in the past.

CSI cake, pick-up truck cake, guitar cake and so many more.

I'm also on twitter now so hit me up @lisaharrold

Todays progress, and a sneaky noment

Sorry for being a bad blogger, friends. I feel bad just showing you progress on my degree show piece.

But that will change soon as I have a fun break coming up!

Today I finished making these beasts.

The plinths on which my degree show pieces will sit!

Me and power tools will never be bffs, but I started to get the hang of the nail gun and sander by the end of it.

Now I just need to paint them. Anyone offering?

(I am 5'2", these plinths are 110cm tall. I felt I needed to tell you that as they make me look insanely tiny.)

After all that hard work I refuelled with this cake that my friend Natalie made.

Regular cupcake right?

Wrong!

Oreo, peanut butter, another Oreo, covered in chocolate brownie.

Holy yum!

I'd seen the recipe on Instructables and facebooked it straight to Natalie knowing her love for both Oreos and peanut butter.

She loves peanut butter so much she paid out £7.99 for a box of Reece's Puffs cereal.

The cakes were delicious and we've started thinking of other cookie/spread/cake combinations.

Bourbon biscuit, Nutella, chocolate cupcake?

Muffin in a Mug

Well it's more of a cake in a mug, but for alliteration purposes we'll call it a muffin.

My friend sent me this recipe when I was in first year and I recently found myself with an egg to spare so it was muffin in a mug time all over again.

Here's the deets:

4 tablespoons of self raising flour

4 tablespoons of sugar

2 tablespoons of cocoa powder

1 egg

3 tablespoons of milk

3 tablespoons of vegetable oil

Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa powder in a mug.

Add the egg and mix well.

Add the milk and oil and until creamy with no lumpy bits.

Microwave for 3 minutes.

It's pretty cool to watch the cake rise up in the mug!

When the time is up get a knife and stab it through the middle of the muffin. If it comes out clean it's done, if not whack it in the microwave for a bit longer.

I recommend eating it straight away while it's still warm. Perfect for if it's been snowing.

Which it has.

It can be a little bit dry so making up some hot chocolate sauce would be awesome, but I didn't think of that until I'd almost finished eating it.

(Recipe originally from wikiHow)

When life gives you apples...

...make apple cake!

Like most years the apple trees in our garden have given us more than enough apples, so much so that if you come to my house you won't leave until you've been asked if you want a bag of apples to take home.

So my Mum's got more creative with ways to use them up including apple and blackcurrant jelly/jam, apple and rhubarb jam, and apple cake. Which is delicious.

The recipe came with a Jordans flour pack many years ago.

And here it is with a few of my Mum's alterations. 

Ingredients

(For sponge base)

5 oz/125g plain wholewheat flour

4 oz/100g butter or margarine

2 eggs

4 oz/100g brown sugar

1tsp baking powder

Apple juice to mix

For topping

2 large cooking or eating apples

1 tablespoon of granulated or caster sugar

1 tsp cinnamon

Method

Sponge:

Cream fat and sugar until soft and fluffy. Beat in eggs gradually. Mix flour and baking powder and fold in water or fruit juice to make a soft mixture. Put into greased tin and spread evenly.

Topping:

Cut apples into quarters' peel, core and trim. Slice finely into crescents. Arrange these in overlapping rows to cover top of raw cake mix. Sprinkle top with mixture of cinnamon and sugar to taste.

Bake in moderate oven 375-400oF/ Gas mark 4-5 for 30 to 40 minutes until cake mix is cooked. Cut into wedges, following the lines of apples.

And you don't have to feel bad about eating cake, because there's fruit in it!

Cake!

The other day (ok, the other month, but I never got round to posting it) my sister and I decorated these cupcakes.

I decorated these ones with pink strawberry flavoured icing and a whole strawberry on top. Does it matter that you can't fit it all in your mouth at once? No!

My sister decorated these with regular butter cream icing, marshmallows and edible glitter which is the best thing ever. She also hid a bit of marshmallow inside the actual cake. Genius.

Noment!

And here they are good to go.

These containers were actually the packaging from some very delicious chocolate cakes but they double up perfectly as cupcake transporters.

I'm back!

Panic over people, my laptop is back.

It had a virus (eep!!) but the folks over at PC World made it all better.

Anyway, right before that all happened one of my very best friends turned 21.

Her boyfriend made her the most awesome cake. A giant cupcake with many little cupcakes around the edge.

And it tasted goooood.

Here's the card I made her.

I thought I'd give 3D decoupage a try.

I printed out the same photo four times (taken from our Cromer beach trip).

Then cut out more and more sections out of each photo and stuck them on top of each other using sticky pads.

I think it makes a regular photo look a bit more special.