An easter egg nest

I was inspired by a cake with an easter egg nest when I was trawling the internet for easter treat ideas. So I got to baking!

The individual brownie cake, which was iced with chocolate ganache, is probably a bit small for the size of the nest but you get the idea.
Simply melt 60g dark chocolate and mix it through 20g vermicelli noodles. Many varieties of vermicelli or cellophane noodles are made of mung bean starch. Make sure to use 100% rice vermicelli as it will soften slightly with the chocolate. The non-rice ones remain tough and hard to chew!
Line a muffin or patty case pan with glad wrap and put the mixture into a nest shape and let them set.

 That quantity of mixture made four.

Once it was set, it was easy to peel them off the glad wrap, fill with mini candy eggs and decorate the top of the cakes.

  

Happy Easter!

Rasperry, Lychee, White Chocolate & Honey...

Cake? Torte? Layered extravaganza? Damn nice, that's what it was!

A very berry dessert...

I had a bit of time up my sleeve and a family dinner. And some raspberries, white chocolate and cream...
I also have two amazing dessert books...The New Patissiers (Olivier Dupon) and Sweet Studio (Darren Purchese) which have incredible desserts that all have many components. And due to having the morning free, I just kept making more layers! I based my layers on ingredients I wanted to use and adapted recipe components from within the two books.

It's Christmas!

For the last few years instead of other gifts, I've been making little decorated Christmas cakes for my friends at Christmas.

I started a few weeks ahead, doing it in sessions, as a fair few hours can be whiled away...

Coloured cocoa butter

I've been interested in using this for quite some time. You see prettily coloured artisan chocolates, but for when we do decorated choccy cakes at school, I've wanted to have a go at achieving that characteristic glossy coloured sheen to see if it's applicable for decorations.

Upside-down quince cake

The humble quince...looks like a cross between a pear and an apple. And not nice to eat raw.

 

Photo by Sarah Ryan

But make up a nice vanilla bean sugar syrup and poach it for a few hours...and watch it change to a glorious jewel-like ruby pink-red colour.

 

                                    Photo by Sarah Ryan                                          Photo by Sarah Ryan
I was making an upside down cake so I sprinkled some brown sugar on the base and lined the tin with the sliced poached quince.

Naked cakes

Naked cakes seem to be a bit of a trend, so I was keen to try out the method. Basicly, it's a style of icing a more formal or party cake, where the layers are still visible and no outer covering of frosting or icing is applied. Often fresh flowers are used for decoration.

Photo by Sarah Ryan

I decided I'd try it out so made two nice butter cakes.

Ombré ruffle cake

Ombré: (adj.) having tones of colour that shade into each other, graduating from light to dark                           (Source: OED online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 3 April 2015)

Ruffle: (n.) A strip of lace or other material, gathered along one edge to make an ornamental frill or decoration (Source: OED online. Oxford University Press, March 2015. Web. 3 April 2015).

So...strips of fondant icing, gradually becoming darker in colour, making frills to decorate the side of a cake!

There are several different methods to do this, mainly whether the frills face upwards (like mine) or downwards (a bit trickier as they tend to want to sit flat against the side of the cake).