What cake did next...

I had a lovely email from the friend who I made the wedding cake for, which reminded me of the half-finished work in progress that resulted from that project. That and being asked for my fruit cake receipe.

Receipes have always been a bit of problem for me as I don't often write things down. I sort of guess - and just carry on until things look like they are okay. To be honest I'm not even very good at following written instructions as I'll get distracted and drop extra things in. Often if I bring cakes into work and people comment on them in my heart I know that there is actually very little chance that I will ever get the same result again. I cook by eye, measure by the handful and wander off halfway through to do other things. Delia would have a fit.

I was determined this time that it wouldn't be like that. The daunting task of a 12 inch diameter, 8 kilo fruit cake does something to rein in the spirit of the runaway chef. A project on that scale is the Ritalin of cookery. If something that size goes wrong, it's an expensive, time consuming mess to sort out and I don't think could face eating that large a failed attempt. And it would just be me eating it as my other half doesn't like dried fruit. In fact very few people I know actually like dried fruit. So this time I weighed things.

A quick sort through my cupboards yielded a five inch, an eight inch, a nine inch and a twelve inch round cake tin. I also have a nine inch, a seven inch and a five inch square.



All of the rest of my baking forms are very daft shapes, so aren't a great deal of use here unless you want a wedding cake shaped like a caterpillar.

I liked geometry at school, so size and volume were easily calculated and I can see that the mixture I'll get in the the seven inch square tin will be the same as what I'll get in the eight inch round one. That makes sense as the seven inch tin has corners that the eight inch round one doesn't. I was going to try and prove this by pouring water from one form to another, but I've just noticed that the round tins have loose bases so that proof-of-concept does have the potential to go horribly horribly wrong and you'll just have to take my word for it.

Cookery time!

As with most cakes, the first part involves beating the butter and sugar to a pulp. I have quite bad RSI, so find this quite difficult and tend to do it in the food mixer. I don't really like the food mixer - partly because to me it was bought because of a physical defeat and is therefore a sign of weakness and partly because if I forget to lock the sneeze guard in place I end up with cake mix in my hair.



Eggs next. Most cookbooks will tell you to beat them in slowly in small portions. Life is too short, just beat them in hard.



Whilst the mixer is doing it's stuff, you can sort the fruit out. Mix the fruit together and soak the whole lot liberally in alcohol. I should tell you to use the finest oak aged cognac, but you could just do what normal people do and douse it in the evil local firewater you bought back from your holidays ten years ago because you have vague recollections of it tasting good on a beach in the sun and don't understand why it suddenly tastes of meths the moment you cross the UK border. I'm using a mixture of Czech plum schnapps, German pear schnapps, Cointreau, Ammaretto and some Hungarian cherry moonshine that was brewed in someone's garage. I must admit that I think alcohol adds nothing to fruit cake other than the aseptic environment you need to stop the bugs eating it. At least by using fruit based and strongly flavoured liquers you can add something to the taste rather than just making the thing smell of petrol. Throw lemon juice and rind in here too and leave it to sit for a bit. If it is a large cake, I do this overnight so the fruit has time absorb the liquid.



I do find that the food mixer overbeats stuff even on the lowest setting (this is the point I get lynched for dispecting the Kenwood on my other internet forum) so I tend to scrape it into a bowl (or a new bucket if it's a big one!) at this point and do the rest by hand. Usually wincing in pain. In goes the fruit, spices and other random bits.



Plonk it into a greased tin (cake release and strip lining will save you a world of stress later on, but it's optional), throw in oven, bake for days until it's solid enough to case serious injury when dropped from a first floor window. Job done. Attack it Quentian Tarantino style with a kebab skewer. Soak in a lethal cocktail of miscellanous spirits, wrap in greaseproof paper and plop into an airtight tin until your ready to use it. Store away from sources of ignition in a well ventilated room. Do not inhale vapour. Get it out and sedate it with more alcohol every so often if you plan to keep it a few months. Otherwise it will get angry. Before you marzipan it, take it out of the greaseproof paper and leave it open to the air to dry off a bit. Or rub the surface with icing sugar.

You may have noticed the lack of promised measurements in this walk-through. That's because I spent quite some time repeating this process on different scales and doing some number crunching.

Here we go :) Numbers! I hope they will be helpful :)

Fruit cake receipe table

This receipe makes a darkish fruit cake - the one I use for wedding cake tiers when dark fruit cake has been specified. The longer you keep it and the more you feed it, the darker it gets. If you want it really dark, use darker sugar and throw a couple of tablespoons of treacle into the mix.

You can alter the ratios of fruits as long as you keep the total mass the same. Sometimes I add all sorts of random stuff to it - dried papaya, dried apricots, prunes, dried pears. I admit that I actually tend to replace the cherries with crystallised apples too (crystallised, not dried) as I don't like cherries, but that's just a personal thing. You can choose whatever nuts you like - I normally use hazelnuts as I think almonds are the cyanide flavoured no-legged spawn of Satan's bedsit, but anything goes. Think of it as a guide, rather than an absolute. It's not a receipe, it's a comfort blanket :)

Oh - and cool oven - gas mark 1 :) If you are doing a big one, wrap the tin in greaseproof paper, stand it on a couple of sheets of newspaper and tie it up with string, that way you won't cremate the edges. It's done when a skewer comes out clean. It will take ages. I cook large ones overnight, turning the oven down to gas 1/2.

Think that's everything...

I would like to say a huge thank you to Selki from Folksy for explaining how to link a file into a blog :) Turtle has some wonderful downloadable projects on his blog too which can be found here

Cake's Progress

I spend my whole life dealing with sugar. I've worked in a labs that deal with sugars for going on five years now and I make cookies and cupcakes out of polymer clay in my spare time. Everything I do revolves around sugar, cake or chocolate. I am Dr. Atkin's nemesis. One day I will make a model of him out of pasta.

To add to all this I'm currently - in my spare time with my other hand - making a wedding cake. I've made a fair few over the years, which is not bad for somebody who is entirely self-taught. This one is for a wedding in a few days time, but it had to be started months ago. It is a long and complicated process. My house is full of sugar flowers that match the bridal bouquet which are drying on wires hanging from everything. There is so much sugar in the air I'm getting hyperglycemic even breathing in and the hallway looks like I've murdered Frosty the snowman.

I feel like I owe you all an apology for being so wrapped up in this project that I have neglected my blog a bit. It had been my intention to create the mother-of-all work in progress walk throughs for the whole project - but I forgot to take photos at the right points and got covered in cake mix for most of it. So I'm just going to waffle for a bit before lapsing back into the normal trend. To be honest, you wouldn't believe me if I posted how I got here anyway as a lot of the tools I use wouldn't be out of place in the hands of a plasterer.

It was sugarcraft that lead me to playing with clay originally, as I found I could replicate flowers in clay before translating them to icing, making exact shapes out of clay to use as supports for drying the final products. I finished sugar flower below about two hours ago and it took three days to get that far. I haven't finished the back yet even though I know noone will see it, I can't leave it raw (you can see the wire wrapped around my hand). I feel like crying when people cut these cakes. I need to get out more.



Icing isn't an easy material to work with but it is where I learnt patience, a Zen-like calm and many words that I can't write on here. Despite the frustration I love sugarcraft. It appeals to my obsessive streak and I can get totally absorbed in it, spending hours and hours on single petals.

So this is the result of nearly five months of work...



Even though it's finished now, it has spawned another little project, which might take me a few weeks to complete, but I'll get there eventually. :)

Bouncing here and there and everywhere

I caught the travel bug much later in life than most people do, I never back-packed round Asia or inter-railled round Europe as a teenager like a lot of my friends did. I was in my twenties before I first left the country if you don't count the usual school day trip to France. I dropped all my language classes at school as soon as I could so never participated in exchange trips and foreign visits either.

These days, however, I find myself travelling more and more. Partially for fun, partially for work. I made eleven trips abroad last year, mainly in Europe but also as far as parts of South East Asia. This year looks like it's going the same way. I came to the conclusion a while back that despite my best efforts I am never going to be carbon neutral unless I plant a rainforest in the backyard.

It took me twelve hours yesterday to get from Frankfurt back to the UK by rail and bus, including the obligatory wait at Brussels and the UK traffic. I like travelling by ICE train, they are smooth, clean and fast. I could have spent the time working, but I admit I played GTA for four hours straight, gazed out of the window a lot and slept for the rest of the journey. Trains are so much more relaxing than planes and the time for me just evaporates. No stress, no panic, no rush. Just calm.

One of the reasons I like travelling is that I often find wonderful things that I can't get at home easily. My craft boxes are a melee of random objects; fabrics from Korea, felt from Germany, beads from Italy, metal from Spain, ribbons from China and buttons from Hungary are staring at me as I type this. At the moment I'm trying not to bring back things until I've used up some of this stuff, so this time I didn't (for once) bring back any art materials.

A couple of weeks ago an American work colleague commented on how much her family liked Haribo and how difficult it was to get that range in the US. We do see a fair amount of the stuff here, but it's nothing like what you can get hold of from the country that invented the stuff. She didn't believe me, so I took some photos and nearly got asked to leave a German supermarket.

I love Haribo. I know it's full of sugar, I know what it's made from and yet I'll still eat it until I feel ill. I love the colours, the sheer variety and the shapes. It does what no other confection really does for me - it makes me feel like a kid in a sweet shop.



I managed to find over twenty different sorts in one supermarket alone. Some of it is now destined for the US, but I am still left with quite a lot of it; which I will take to work for our morning coffee time. I can't really just dump kilos of sweets in the kitchen though, but maybe I can build something.

The last time I made a "sweet cake" it was a smallish effort for a birthday of a vegan friend who doesn't like chocolate. Getting hold of vegan sweets wasn't a particularly easy task at the time, so the end result wasn't as impressive as I would have liked it to be. I used curling ribbon to hold my last effort together, but this time I want it be made entirely from jelly sweets. This might cause some difficulties given the wierd shapes you get in bag of this stuff and the fact it's really really squishy. So some structural compenents first - Haribo marshmallows tied up in groups of three with strawberry laces.



I've stuffed the inside with some twisty sugar rolls because they are heavy and rigid and are helping to hold my marshmallow towers in place.



Foam safari animals next...



More spirals, then some more rigid berries. I actually don't like these berries, but they are nice and solid, so help with the weighting. I've added some liqcorice between the marshmallows for a bit of colour.



Sugar mice and easter bunnies for this layer...



Then finished off with sweet pasta, more liqcorice and easter shapes.



Hmm... It doesn't quite look like the picture in my head, but it will do for the time being. Maybe I shouldn't be such a purist and break out the wooden skewers for supports next time. Watch this space...

I'm afraid of Americans

I've had this David Bowie song stuck in my head all day. It's a great song - even better, dare I say it, when covered by Trent Reznor and belted out live to a packed arena. I've not spent a great deal of time in the US and what time I have spent there has mainly been in airport transit lounges. I seem to fly to the US to get interrogated and poked around, then fly off somewhere else. International soil? Yeah right. Nice.

Up until recently, I would have considered America's best contribution to the world of food to be cheese slices you could use as sticky notes. I don't really like peanut butter very much; as I can't bring myself to eat something you could use to grout the bathroom and I don't like the bread. I don't eat a lot of meat, so I get funny looks. I am a self confessed diet coke addict, but I don't know what they put in it in the US to make it taste like that. I can't cope with the sheer amount of food I am given, it puts terror in my heart. Despite all this, I think I'm in the minority when I say that I actually have a massive respect for the much maligned American confectionary. I like Hershey's chocolate, I like marshmallow fluff and M&Ms (even the peanut butter ones). I even like marshmallow peeps. I've eaten twinkies and lived. Say what you will, America understands sugar very very well. It does sugar properly, without the guilt of the British or the arrogance of the continent and (quite rightly) doesn't give a damn what you think.

My quest for the perfect chocolate drop of my childhood hit a wall yesterday when I spent my afternoon wandering around all of the shops near my department looking for sweets that looked like sweets rather than pale looking sweets made with fruit juice and extract of hippies. There was nothing even remotely appealing looking, nothing bright, nothing that screamed chromophore. The history of chemistry is littered with wonderful stories of the brightest dyes and quests for the most amazing colours and now everything I see looks like it's been washed at 90 degress with a black sock. Then it struck me, I needed big, bold, bright and brash. I needed confident. I needed American.

In the UK, getting hold of American treats isn't easy unless you are lucky enough to have American work collegues who you can send home with a shopping list. A couple of the delis round here sell marshmallow fluff, Reese's pieces and peanut butter cups. You can buy Oreo cookies in most supermarkets. I bring back lucky charms breakfast cereal for my sister everytime I go to the US but I occassionally see boxes here too.

M&M's, however, are fairly ubiquitous. Okay, so they don't come in 3 kg bags, nor do they taste like ones from the US because they are manufactured on the continent, packed in Ireland and have more Airmiles than I do, but they look the part. I wonder if they have a vacancy for a proof reader in the factory; they may even let me eat all the w's.



M&M's are similar to Smarties anatomically, although they are prettier, brighter, shinier and more regularly shaped. They are slighly smaller - still not as flat as the Smarties of old, but certainly closer in shape than the current stage of evolution of the chocolate drop was to its ancestor. Because the colours are nice and bright, matching is simpler. It matches to a different red from the fimo range than the last one.



So, same procedure as before - little chocolate coloured discs...



then a white layer...



then the outer shell...



All done!



As before, a sugarcraft cutter can be used to nip out a bite mark.



There is no need for sanding and dappling this time, just a quick dusting with varnish.



So there we go. Chocolate drops of the present (right) with their distant cousins, chocolate drops of the past (left). Long may their memory be preserved.

I'm afraid I can't help it. I'm afraid I can't.

I'm not sure...

I used to work in the chemical industry before I went back into university research. People always laugh when I tell them my industry job was watching paint dry, even though that was actually what I got paid to do on a day to day basis. One of the best thing about the work however (other than the fact I had access to a great deal of very good very cheap paint) was that our plant site was shared with a confectionary company and we had a joint staff shop. Never before have I ever seen a shop that sold only floor varnish, satin emulsion, weedkiller and massive quantities of chocolate. I hold them solely responsible for my addiction to Galaxy caramel and my hatred of the smell of acrylic monomers.

Claire, from Blackcatswhiskers, who makes (amongst other things) the most wonderful button jewellery - you can see it here: http://www.folksy.com/shops/blackcatswhiskers - asked if I'd ever made charms shaped like chocolate drops. I hadn't, but I'm always up for a challenge. Bizarrely, given that I consider chocolate to be one of the four major important food groups (the others being coffee, cheese and red wine) it's been an awfully long time since I last ate a packet of them.

They are not how I remember at all. I remember them being really brightly coloured - the sort of colours that make kids hyperactive and are banned in most EU countries - where as now they are sort of pale and a little bit insipid looking. They aren't as regularly shaped as I remember either - there are some seriously mutant ones hiding in the box I'm eating as I type. They are also larger than they used to be and they taste different.



I used to love smarties - I still have my gruesome greenies plastic pouch and my glow in the dark smartians somewhere. I loved it when they printed footballs or funny faces on them and when they hid white chocolate ones in the packs. A quick look on the back revealed that they'd replaced the artifical colourings with natural colourings.

Meh. If I eat sweets I am making an active choice to ingest stuff that isn't good for me, I don't want it to be a way of sneakily making sure I eat my vegtables.

But the saddest thing is the demise of the tube :( I feel like part of my childhood has been stolen. The best thing about smarties was the tube, you could smack an empty tube hard and fire the lid acros the room. And I loved the letters on the caps too. They have questions on them now too - and of the three packets I have here (for research purposes) the answer is incorrect on one of them. I guess children aren't allowed to choke on educational things any more.

This little experiment is therefore a two part practical class. I want to make chocolate drops past and present. I'm going to start with making a model of what I can see before I try to resurrect the ghost of chocolates past.

I learnt a long time ago that the easiest way to understand something is to take it apart and see how it works. Even with an item as simple as a chocolate drop, the satisfaction of smacking something with a hammer is immense.



Chocolate centres, white coating, coloured outside.

As far as the colourings go, the easiest colour match for the clay I have is red. It's almost spot on; although the colours aren't as uniform any more either and the surface is slightly dappled.



Inside first! They aren't a uniform mass any more, but I need something smaller as I have to do two more layers on top of this.



Now the white layer...



then the outer shell..



Spot the difference! (I'll give you a hint, two are real!)



Lily of the valley sugarcraft cutters make great bite marks, so it's a fair test to see if the inside looks okay. As they are charms, I pierced them before baking them. If you bake polymer clay at a slightly higer temperature, you will cause crazing on the surface, so that was perfect to mimic the cracks in the shell of the bitten one. A quick going over with a hand engraving tool added the surface dappling/crazing and satin varnish (which I have had in the cupboard since I left my 9 - 5 job) is added for the shine.



Hmmm... they are a pretty good match, but somehow I think there is a little room for some artistic license here. I want them to be pretty, I want them to be shiny, I want them to look how I remember...

....to be continued