Minecraft cake

Minecraft Steve guarding
the rice crispie treat house

About a week and a half ago I was asked to make a Minecraft cake for one of my cousins' son's birthday. This time I also received a list of objects and characters which should be included, and I tried my hardest to fulfill at least some of the wishes. :)

This was the list:
"The cake could have a house, goodie character Steve with a diamond sword, a few little pigs and baddies as many as you can make. Baddies are wished in the order the pictures are, so you can leave them out from the end of the list. Steve should be at the house and baddies should be attacking."

The baddies were listed in this order:
Slender man, Herobrine (who also should have a diamond sword), pig, mutant enderman, mutant creeper, mutant zombie, skeleton, enderman



I tried my best, hope it's enough for Robin! :)

Herobrine (with the sword)

Slender man

Pig

Sand cake

"Don't be a bad cake, be a good cake"...


This is something most Finnish kids say (in Finnish though) after filling a bucket with sand, turning it over, and hitting the bottom of the bucket with a sand shovel. :) 

This time, I made an actual edible version of this "sand cake"


This became my holiday cake, as although it doesn't yet feel that way, my summer holiday starts tomorrow. Originally I planned to make a cake that would have represented a sandy beach, as I wanted to try edible sand on a cake. At some point the beach turned into a bucket of sand, and the next idea was to make a bucket shaped cake which had sand in it. Due to lack of time, that idea was simplified even further, and the cake became a very basic sand cake from my childhood.


(the sand toys behind the cake are just photo props, as I didn't have time to make edible versions :) )



I tried a peach flavoured filling for this cake. We'll see how that goes down with my colleagues tomorrow... :)



Peach filling: (for a 6 egg cake)

230 g       canned peaches in juice
                     (NB! 230 g is the net weight for the peaches! Of course you can also use fresh peaches)
150 g       peach flavoured quark
3,5 dl       double cream
5              gelatin leaves
2 tbsp      fruit juice or water


Put the gelatin leaves into cold water to soak for 5-10 minutes. 
Drain peaches and puree them. Mix in the quark.
Whip the cream.
When the gelatin leaves are soft, squeeze out excess water and and melt them with boiling hot juice or water. Add the gelatin mix into the peach quark mix and stir well. Add whipped cream and mix until smooth.



How to make a sand cake:

Bake two different size cakes (I used 15cm and 20cm tins)

Cut the cake bases into discs as usual, place on top of each other
and cut into rough shape

Fill the cake, cover with cling film and place in the fridge to set
(I used a partition board between the two cakes so that the cake would eventually be easier to cut into portions. You can see pictures of how to do that here)

Once the cake is set, carve it into its final shape and cover with buttercream

Crush different colour biscuits with a blender into fine powder.
You can also mix in different colour sugars,
which make the biscuit sand glisten like the real deal

Cover the buttercream with biscuit sand and decorate for example
with sugar fondant stones or clams if you want

TOPModel birthday cake

This cake was a result of a trade, as I needed cardboard cake boxes from Lappeenranta and my cousin needed a birthday cake for her daughter.

Apparently the birthday girl likes TOPModel -books, so I took that idea and used my long-ago-acquired but so far unused book shaped cake tin. I didn't however remember to check the amount of filling with the volume of the tin, so this time the cake turned up slightly flat. Oops. (*This time I got to taste the cake too, and I noticed that the amount of filling was actually just right in the end. Phew)
I also forgot to draw the lines of the pages while the fondant was still soft, so I left them out completely. Double oops.

Once again I wanted to bring "something extra" to the cake, so I ended up making a couple of colour pencils (with birthday girl's name and age on them) and of course a much needed pencil sharpener and some pencil shavings - all out of sugar fondant. :)



This cake had a caramel filling, but my unfortunately my "Limited Edition" Daim hot chocolate powder ran out and the Dumle hot chocolate I replaced it with just wasn't quite caramelly enough.

Baby Shower cake for a boy

This week's order was this strawberry flavoured Baby Shower cake for a mother-to-be expecting a baby boy.




The cake was supposed to look like a proper 'Yankee cake', and not like one that has been picked up from a local bakery. Decorations were meant to be baby trainers and "to the side some rattle and blocks etc.", and on top of the cake should read: "It's a boy!"


Hopefully this version is 'Yankee' enough! :D

Sugary Octonauts

This time I didn't get a request for a cake, but cake decorations - more precisely "Octonauts". The characters were requested in 2D, so that it was possible to make bigger figures with less fondant.

After a short internet search I found out that the characters in the above picture were called Kwazii, Captain Barnacles and Peso.

A later addition was this "octo alert button" on the right. 

Congratulations to Matias, whose birthday cake these figures will top!

Strawberry and rhubarb panna cotta (cake)

Last Friday I was with a group of people from work in Sokos Hotel Flamingo in Vantaa, and happened to also have a taste of vanilla panna cotta with summer berries. 

I have to admit that I had never eaten, let alone made a panna cotta before, so from the first spoonful my mind was racing with different ways to modify this dessert.

I browsed through the internet for different panna cotta recipes (and there are many!), and finally decided to combine them into my own version.

I wanted to fight the traditional way of serving this dessert and decided to make it in a springform pan (not a good idea), so I made a biscuit crumb layer in the bottom. Using a springform pan with this recipe was challenging, as the thin liquid panna cotta mix oozed out the sides before setting, and I had to spoon it back in the tin a couple of times. Luckily I was far-wise (?) and put the entire tin on a larger plate to begin with. (Perhaps it might have helped if I'd let the panna cotta mix cool down and set a bit more before pouring into the pan?)


Biscuit base: (for a ø20cm tin)

120 g   oatmeal biscuits
50 g     margarine

Crush the biscuits into small crumbs. Melt the margarine and add into the crumbs. Place a baking sheet into a springform pan and spread the biscuit crumbs evenly by pressing gently into the bottom of the pan.



Panna cotta:

6 dl       double cream
2 dl       semi-skimmed milk
0,5 dl    sugar
1           vanilla bean
5           gelatin leaves

Pour the cream, milk and sugar into a pan. Slice the vanilla bean lengthways and scrape the seeds into the cream. Boil the cream, milk, sugar and vanilla bean in a pan. Take off the heat, remove the vanilla bean, and carry on mixing every now and then. 
Put the gelatin leaves into cold water to soak for 5-10 minutes. When the gelatin leaves are soft, squeeze out excess water.
Put the gelatin leaves into the warm cream-mix and stir until they're completely dissolved. Let the mix cool down to body temperature before pouring into (cooled) dessert bowls. Let set in the fridge for a few hours.

If you want to try your luck with the springform pan, I recommend to try cooling the cream-mix down to a semi-set stage before pouring into the pan. Or alternatively you can spoon the oozed-out mix back into the pan every half an hour. :)


Rhubarb topping:

2 dl        water
2 dl        rhubarb sliced (approx.100g)
1 dl        jam sugar

Put the water and the rhubarb into a pan and bring to boil. Add the jam sugar into the boiling mix while stirring. Let cool down slightly and spoon over the already set panna cotta (over frozen or fresh strawberries). Place back in the fridge and let set for a while.

Graduation cake for tourism master students

This time I was asked to make a cake for tourism master students in graduation phase, so my idea was to combine school books and a few famous landmarks. The name of the book in the bottom was chosen by accident, as I jokingly wrote it in my design just to show a possibility to add text. The person who ordered this cake thought the name was just right, and so it stayed.





The cake was supposed to be a combination of Baileys and chocolate, so I modified the recipe used in the Miss Piggy house warming cake a couple of weeks ago. I may have poured a little too much Baileys in this one though... :)







Baileys and chocolate filling: (for a ø20-24cm cake)

300 g      vanilla flavoured quark
60 g        dark chocolate
3 tbsp     Baileys (I may have put 4 tbsp)
2             leaves of gelatin (I put 3 as this was
                    a shaped cake)
1 tbsp     water
2 dl         double cream



Let the gelatin leaves soak in cold water for about 5-10 minutes.
Whip the cream, and in a separate bowl mix together vanilla quark, melted dark chocolate and Baileys.
Squeeze out excess water from the gelatin leaves, and melt them with a tablespoonful of boiling hot water. Add the gelatin mix into the quark-chocolate-Baileys mix and stir well. Add the whipped cream and stir carefully.

I was supposed to create an effect where the palm tree starts on the book page as 2D and continues upwards as 3D, but I couldn't get it to work quite as well as I planned it

The Eiffel Tower consisted of 13 minuscule 

pieces, which almost made me lost my cool a 

couple of times when gluing them together :)

Finally I did manage to get the

Eiffel Tower somewhat right