Our flat makes cake

Our flat makes cake. We make it at any notice, at all hours. Between the three of us we can always manage to muster all the ingredients needed to make anything from lemon slices, to coffee & walnut muffins and carrot cake even cakes made for spur of the moment birthday presents.

We will be sitting relaxing, probably about eight o'clock on a Thursday night and someone will say, I want something sweet to eat, but I don't want to got out for chocolate. They will turn to the other two and we will put our ingredients together and 40 minutes later, a delicious cake will come fresh from the oven, with almost no effort at all.

When S was living with us, she decided to make a cake for a friend's birthday, it was eleven o'clock by the time it came out of the oven so there was no time to stay up to let it cool ready for icing. She was up early decorating it before work the next day.

This is how it is done in our household. We are dedicated to cake.

My tour of Great Britain: in the grounds of Cawdor Castle

On our first full day in Scotland, which was also N's birthday,  we decided to take in some of the history of the area and visit a Cawdor Castle which was a short drive from our caravan in Nairn.

It was beautifully bright and sunny but the wind had a cold kick to it in the morning, so we opted for looking around the house first.

It didn't look like a stuffy home that  nobody had touched for the last 50 years, each style had been piled upon the last with books stacked everywhere and personal photos of the family ranging from the sixties to the present day - the Dowager Countess of Cawdor still lives in the castle during the winter months.

We sat down for lunch by a tree with a pretty red bench next to it, although it was warmer now, there was still a cold nip in the air so the café selling hot drinks was welcome.

After lunch we walked around the castle gardens which put us even more in the mood for tea and birthday cake back at the caravan.

 

A quick stop at Peyton and Byrne

When I don't have time to bake cake myself or I need to take cake to an event at short notice I make a quick stop by my local Peyton and Byrne in St. Pancras Station. They make the most beautiful and tasty cakes for any occasion, from carrot cake and victoria sponge (sold by the slice or whole cake) to swiss rolls and mini banoffee pies (my favourite).

They also do loose leaf teas and biscuits for gifts that need to travel!

I took these to a triple birthday gathering last night. They don't look very pretty (well maybe the heart shaped raspberry sponge does), but they're very tasty. Larger than you're average pastry or cupcake, they are a great sharing size for everyone to just dive in with a fork.

I ordered: Chocolate and cream swiss roll, lemon curd swiss roll, banoffee pie and fresh raspberry and cream sponge sandwich. These must be stored in the fridge if not eating immediately.

What got me started was

What got me started was my sister's 21st birthday garden party.  My Mum and I wanted to make small cakes as people were coming throughout the day and we wouldn't have have a specific point in the day to cut a larger cake.  Cup cakes seemed to be the right way to go.

We looked around the shops and some of the boutique bakeries and market stalls which are popping up but nothing seemed to to hit the spot or price range.  In the end, we'd looked at so many ideas that we thought we could do a good enough job ourselves.

My mum has always been a keen cook and baked many memorable cakes for me and my sister when we were growing up, many of which were fairy-tale themed, a rice-paper turreted cake and a real Barbie surrounded by a cake skirt spring to mind.

We got to work and produced some rough looking but pretty and much loved cakes.  The pink theme didn't affect the men trying them, particularly my great uncle who I noted tucked in first.

One Year Later

I started making cakes around a year ago. Since then I have taken a course in traditional cake decorating, baked for birthdays, christmas parties and any other time that I felt like. It even got to the point where my cakes could have been stocked in a local deli almost everyday, something which I eventually decided against.

This year has also seen a few other changes and it's meant that my cake making has become a hobby which I do for friends and friends of friends and events that just crop up. I don't really go looking for cake work, it just finds me.

Whilst making the cakes, I have also been documenting them. I have decided to put them online, instead of randomly on twitter, this way they will all be in one place and hopefully I will remember to upload anything in the future that I bake.