Cake School

My brother enrolled me on a cake decorating course at the local college for a Christmas present so I've been doing that every Thursday evening for the last few weeks.

There's been two practical sessions so far as the first week was an induction session, and here's the results of my labours:

Buttercream icing and piping.

Marzipan covering and modeling. This one got a bit bashed up on the back of my bike when I hit a couple of potholes so the penguins have a bit of a flat head. I might need to rethink my Friday morning transport arrangements...

Incidentally, did you know that marzipan has the same consistency and smell as Semtex? (see http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4161/is_/ai_n14530173)

83.0773284 miles

I'll try to stop being a bicycle bore after this, but I spotted my total distance traveled on the cycle computer today - 133.7 kilometers...



... which made me smile a little bit.

Riding The Company Bike

I finally got round to buying a bike this weekend (it's a Specialized Tricross for anyone that cares). I'm pretty pleased with it so far, although it looks a *little* bit girly with the front and back panier racks on. I've already clocked up 20km trying frantically to keep up with my brother on a little trek through the rat-runs of around North London yesterday, which nearly killed me.

We're planning a pedal-powered road trip down to Cornwall some time in May so I need to do a *lot* of training to get up to scratch since my exercise regime to date has consisted of, er, absolutely nothing, and we'll be aiming to do about 90-100km a day on the trip. Yikes.

Incidentally, if you run a small business there's a great tax scheme called "Cycle To Work" which lets you save about 35% off the cost of the bike by reclaiming the VAT and offsetting depreciation against corporation tax. You just need to have a half-arsed cover story about using the bike for travel to work - e.g. cycling to a train station qualifies.

That's what I've done, so I will now be literally riding the company bike every morning and evening :-).

Christmas Cake, Part II

It's taken a bit longer than I thought to make (as in I started making it last night at 19:00 and it's now 07:55) but it's finally finished.

God knows how I'm going to get it in to work tomorrow - it weighs a ton.



There's also something not 'quite right' with it. It might just be a bit wonky. I might see if there are any cake decoration night classes going on - my icing needs a bit of work, I think.

Anyway, there you go. Same again in another 12 months...

Update
It melteded...

Christmas Cake, Part I

Not content with moving house this weekend and only being half-packed so far, I've chosen Thursday as the day to take a Christmas cake in to work.

Here's the blueprints. I think Jayce suggested this last year so props to him for the idea:



I'm going to use the same home-made cake stand I used last year so it'll stand about 20 inches high in 4 tiers when done. I'll try to make the arms with florists wire covered in icing.

More info to follow shortly...

How Not To Cook Pizza

I've been sitting here this evening working away and I've just noticed I feel quite tired. I'm normally a bit of a night-owl so 01:00 is a fairly early for me to have heavy eyelids.

I've just worked out why, and it's because of a sequence of seemingly unrelated facts...

• I'd made some muffins for breakfast at the weekend with some cheap sausages that gave off a lot of fat and I haven't cleaned the grill pan yet.


• The bedroom I use for an office is directly above my kitchen, but the stairs are in the opposite corner of the house, making me 2 hypotenuses and 1 storey away from the kitchen.


• I bought a pizza for tea tonight as I was feeling a bit lazy, and in my haste to scoff it I didn't turn the oven off. I *did*, however turn the grill on instead without realising.

The result: my grill has been happily turning the fat from the sausages to a very thin smoke for the last 5 hours and I didn't notice. My eyes did, however, and they want to close now.

And that is how not to cook pizza.

Halloween Cake, Part II

I'll keep this short because it's 02:00 and I'm quite tired now as I've just finished making my Halloween cake for work.

If you remember the sketch from a couple of weeks ago it was supposed to look like this.

First, a little bit of prep work. I've been making some vanilla sugar for the last few weeks (I say 'making', but all I did was put a vanilla pod in some sugar) so I'm going to use that in the cake.

... and I need some coloured icing, too.

I'll skip the cake baking thing, so it's just about making the pumpkin...

My first quadruple-decker cake :-). It's a bit burnt around the edges but I'm going to cut them off anyway so it doesn't really matter.

I put it in the freezer for an hour so it was a bit firmer and easier to hack around with.

A marzipan wrap so the icing has a smoother finish. I used apricot jam as a glue to hold it in place. It's also starting to creep me out a little bit.

Another layer of jam and coloured icing creates the finished product. I've carved out the face just like the real thing.

So there we go. I'm quite pleased with it, if I do say so myself...