Severed Hand Cake

Ok, now this one might need some explaining...

My brother's having a bear-themed fancy dress party this weekend, and I said I'd make cake for him if he came up with a concept. One of his friends suggested a severed hand - the result, I suppose, of an unlucky encounter with a bear.

So here it is:

I wanted it to look like a hand when you cut through it so I dyed the cake mix pink with food colouring before cooking it, then carved out some channels for bones made from icing once it came out of the oven.

The hand with the icing for bones in position. Probably not anatomically correct, but I did remember to put *two* bones in the arm - the ulna and radius. And yes, I did just have to Google their names :-).

Making the rest of it was fairly pedestrian - just covering the cake with marzipan and ready-to-roll icing. The end result, however, was pretty gruesome. (The blood is some raspberry jam my brother made last month from the leftovers from the summer pudding).

Creme Caramel

I used to love creme caramel as a kid, so now I'm all grown up (allegedly) it's about time I started to make them :-).

I'm writing this post retrospecitvely, so I can't remember why there are no eggs in the photo. I must have forgotted to get them out of the fridge for the line-up shot. Anyway, the first step is to heat some sugar with a bit of vanilla to form the syrup. Burn the sugar to a rich brown colour, then pour into the bottom of a dish and turn it to cover the entire base.

Blitz all the remaining ingredients together, then pour into the cooled dish on top of the solidified sugar syrup.

Cover with tin foil and chuck it in the oven for a while until it's just about solidified (don't worry - it'll firm up as it cools). For extra points, bake in a bain marie so it dries out less.

To turn it out, run a knife around the edge of the dish, then place a plate upside-down on top. Turn the whole thing over and watch as the syrup runs over the top of the dessert. Yum.

Summer Pudding

I went round a friend's house for dinner a couple of weeks ago and she made a great summer pudding for desert, so I thought I'd try one myself...

Gently heat some fruit and sugar for a few minutes until it starts simmering.

Whack the heat up for a minute or so until there's plenty of juices coming out of the fruit, then remove from the heat.

Get some thinly sliced bread and let it go a little stale. This is so it holds its shape once it's soaked in the fruit.

Remove the crusts and cut into a series of elaborate shapes so it lines a small bowl.

Soak one side of the bread in the fruit juices, then line the bowl with the soaked side on the *outside*.

Fill the bowl with the remaining contents of the saucepan, make a lid out of some more bread then compress down with a saucer and some weights (a bag of sugar works). Put in the fridge overnight.

To turn it out, run a knife around the edge of the bowl, put a plate over the bowl then invert. Don't do this too early before you're ready to serve it as it might just collapse into a pile of splodge.

Serve with cream. This is my new favouritest thing ever.

Competition Victory!

I'll start by possibly repeating myself since I can't remember if I've already mentioned that I started a cake decorating course at the local college back in January. If I didn't before, then I have now...

Anyway, tonight was the last night of the course and instead of taking a cake along to decorate in class we had a little competition - we had to take along a pre-decorated cake and they all got judged like at a proper classy village fete.

It was a pretty good turnout but in the end it kind of boiled down to three cakes, which the judges took quite a while discussing and scoring. The full spread is below for your viewing pleasure:

As seen by the West-side posse.

As seen by the East-side posse.

In the end the winner was this one. Which also happens to be the one I made :-).

I'm not sure I totally agree with their decision though. I mean, I was pleased with how mine turned out and everything, but the whole course was based around piping and more classical techniques. The turquoise basket in the middle of the table should really have won since all those flowers were piped and the basket weave itself must have taken a good couple of hours to make.

In any case, I accepted my prize with dignity, poise and graciousness, and wondered to myself whether my victory was owed in part to the Derren Brown mind tricked I played on them - this was the t-shirt I wore to class:

Action Photo!

I'm back from holiday now and just about adjusted to the local time zone.

There were professional photographers on the mountain taking photos of everybody coming down one of the runs. I've just been poring through the pictures on their website and found myself:

I'm not quite ready to pay the $35 they want for a 5x7 print so I guess I'll just have to settle for these thumbnail versions...

Photosynth - Sand Harbor

We went for a drive around Lake Tahoe the day before yesterday in the Durango and, surprisingly, survived some of the dodgy roads.

We stopped at a little snow-covered beach called Sand Harbor for a cheeky photo opportunity and I wanted to try the new (free) Photosynth software from Microsoft - you basically take a load of overlapping photos of a scene and then upload them to a site which stitches them together into a continuous, scrollable image. Well, sort of...

You need to download and install the Photosynth client to make it work, but here's my synth of Sand Harbour (click and drag to scroll the camera angle):



If that doesn't work or you don't want to download the client, here's a Flickr folder with the images in. (Incidentally, Flickr has recently started letting you create unlimited sets on free accounts).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/21714162@N07/sets/72157615437914973

American Cars

I'm in the middle of a snowboarding holiday at the moment and since most of the gondolas are closed today I thought I'd tell you a little bit about our hire car.

It's a Dodge Durango (see below) which boasts a spectacular 13mpg fuel consumption, and a top speed of about 70mph, if you dare take it up that far.



I'm not the one driving but I'm reliably informed it handles about as well as a small barge. In fact, there's even a warning on the driver's-side sun visor:



All-in-all, not the most reasurring thing to see when you've got a drop like this by the side of the road:



The scenery *is* pretty spectacular though if you can take your mind off the car's interesting handling quirks for long enough to enjoy it. More photos to follow...