Obsession

I went to Cork last week for work and found a rather lovely shop called Brennan' s which I LOVED. The entire first floor is cake *stuff* and it's hung with all the icing cutters you could want on the wall. I was in there oohing twice over the same Saturday. The lady let me :) I decided to purchase a Gerbera cutter set, the biggest Wilton petal nozzle I could find, briar rose cutters, red fondant, and various other little flower cutters as well as the red fondant. So since I was home with no plans this weekend, this is what I got up to . The icing is strawberry flavoured icing from Silverspoon which I bought on a whim. It's interesting stuff. 125g which you add a spoon of water to and then mix with butter. Pretty effective as it doesn't cause huge icing sugar clouds to form. I might see if I can do that for my normal buttercream. Note that it does say it covers 12 fairy cakes, not cupcakes, and certainly with my decorations it doesn't really stretch. The colour...

It's been a while since I last blogged, but in fairness I've not made anything blogworthy. Nothing uber pretty, no recipes I thought were inspiring, but here come the pictures and the round-up of my recent bakes. Coconut and lime cake - tangy. The sponge was quite unique in that it used 1/2 a grated block of coconut and it became very light and a different type of sponge to normal. Not chiffon, not victoria, not muffin, but different. The topping was a bit tangier than I wanted, but next time I'll get it to marshmallow properly. As a nice afternoon tea kind of thing, I'd make it again. Low fat strawberry gateau - call it shortcake. This was an interesting proposition, and wasn't that bad. You had to accept that the "sponge" was more biscuit, but then there wasn't a raising agent and when you poured it onto the swiss roll tin it spread so thin the creases in the baking parchment showed and the cake curled when the paper curled from the heat. Wh...