Rachel bakes at home: Birthday cakes continued.....

By her eleventh birthday my daughter had been given a hummingbird bakery book and was always trying out recipes from it, so it seemed fitting that she should have a cupcake cake.

The recipe, this time, came from Cake Decorating magazine issue 1 - the chocolate sponge cake.

225g unsalted butter
225g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
175g self raising flour
50g cocoa powder

Oven at 180oc ( gas mark 4 )

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time ( they work best if used at room temperature ). Fold in half of the flour amd cocoa and mix well, then fold in the other half. The bottom half of the cupcake is larger than the top half so took around 15 minutes longer to cook than the recommended 15 minutes - 25 minutes.

The cake is decorated with strawberries and buttercream icing; 150g butter, 300g icing sugar. The strawberries were a little wet and made the top half of the cake a bit unstable, but they were yummy anyway. On the top is a little fondant icing cupcake.

Next was my youngest son's 2nd birthday. His favourite programme was Peppa pig so I started with Peppa's house. To make the house shape I baked a square cake and cut out a smaller square and a triangle and stuck them together using buttercream icing, then covered it in royal icing. To get the right shade of yellow I used a large piece of white icing and a small piece of yellow icing and rolled them over and over again until they were combined to make pale yellow. The most time consuming parts were the windows and the roof. The roof is made up of individual overlapping red icing squares. The windows are squares with four mini squares cut out.

The cake is a madeira cake. Slightly firmer than a regular sponge and good for cutting. The recipe came from issue 2 of Cake Decorating magazine.

200g unsalted butter
200g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
200g self raising flour
100g plain flour
grated zest of 1 and 1/2 lemons

Preheat the oven to 170oc (gas mark 3)
Cream the butter and sugar until fluffy. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Fold both flours into the mixture, then add the lemon zest. It will take around 60 - 80 minutes to cook.
It can be left for up to 24 hours before decorating.

Peppa's house sits at the top of a hill, so the cake was covered with light green royal icing to represent the hill. The path was made by cutting out the path shape from the green icing then filling it in with buttercream and sprinkling rainbow sprinkles over it. The house is kept in place with the help of two skewers. The peppa pig character wafers around the bottom of the cake were found on ebay. The peppa and the car were free with a peppa magazine!

My husband is an avid fisherman so deciding what kind of cake I was going to make for his 29th birthday was really easy. The cake is a madeira cake with the addition of toffee flavouring and some fudge pieces. The fudge pieces all gathered in the middle and made the cake sink, which was perfect for making the pond. The icing is buttercream, coloured blue for the water, and green for the grass. I found a fishing road and fish mould on ebay and used brown fondant icing to make the rods and fish. The grass is made by using a nozzle on the end of the piping bag with tiny pin sized holes.

After getting Super mario bros 2 my eldest son asked for a mario cake. I started by making the Mario. He's made out of coloured fondant icing and held together with cocktail sticks.