The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Seven (Final!)

This was cake day, so after a morning meeting at work, I came home to meet Laura and James and complete the cake. This involved tiling and adding the lettering. First thing was to place the tiles on the life-size paper mockup that Laura had printed out early in the process. We picked the best, most consistent tiles.



Then we carefully transferred them to the cake, gently squidging them into the buttercream. And here it is, all finished, with colour-flow lettering in "Kelmscott", a William Morris font, applied to the fondant base with royal icing. Laura applied a lovely orange ribbon with tiny white polka dots to the surround of the fondant-covered cake board.



Here is a close-up of the tiles.



Then it was careful transportation time. I said the same thing I say each year to James: "If you drop it, no worries. It's not worth the aggravation." He didn't drop it. :)



And here is the cake before the fireplace in a lovely room at Trinity College, where it was consumed with much wine and excellent company.

To sum... this year all the separate details like the buttercream and the colourflow icing all seemed to go especially smoothly. I think it was the tastiest cake we've done too. I guess once you do this often enough, it gets easier. Even the cutting went well. I wish I had remembered to take a picture of the empty cake board. It was surprisingly neat. Many of the guests wrapped up tiles (those who got them) and took them home. This cake fed 70 with several second portions!

Thank you dear Laura and James for being such wonderful cake collaborators, and - most importantly - dear friends. And thank you readers for your interest and encouraging comments. Watch this space about a year from now! Hee hee.

Now I'm going to curl up with Tibby and give the last half of this bottle of wine a good home. Happy Earth Hour everyone!

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Six

The cake was filled with lemon curd, courtesy of Mark (one layer featured his special Limoncello lemon curd)...

... and then the three layers were coated twice with swiss meringue buttercream.

Now it awaits tiling and finishing in the morning.

Uh Oh

9:05 p.m. Back from work.

9:15 p.m. Thought I'd treat myself to a healthy dose of day dreaming

9:20 p.m. That felt good. But just remembered cake must be filled and buttercreamed tonight.

... and have work meeting at 11 a.m. tomorrow (yes, a Saturday)... and cake event is in afternoon.

9:25 p.m. Too late to panic or day dream.

9:26 p.m. Shuffling in a surly manner into the kitchen to show sugar, eggs, vanilla, and butter who's boss.

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Five

The last and third vanilla-flavoured layer is baked and photographed below. The layers will be trimmed to 15" x 15". On Friday night the cake will be filled with home-made lemon curd and then coated twice with a generous amount of cooked buttercream icing. On Saturday the tiles will be placed as you would if you were tiling your bathroom. That's why we need fairly generous amounts of the icing - to hold it all on!

Once this last layer is cooled and covered, I'll be off to bed. Stay tuned...

Widmark Over Sardines

Many things make me think of my dad (currently holidaying with my mum in Mexico). But two things come to mind particuarly. One is Richard Widmark. The other is sardines.

Today it was announced that Richard Widmark passed away yesterday at the age of 93. He was the actor my father referenced years ago when I was very little, to explain to me how someone might play a certain sort of character in film or on stage, but be very different in real life. He'd seen Widmark play his signature psychopaths on screen and then appear in interviews as a modest and charming man. When he told me all this I hadn't seen a Widmark movie and when I finally saw him in his first screen role as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947, directed by Henry Hathaway) I wasn't with my father. We finally saw it together last year and shivered together at his psychotic gaze and that manic giggle as he pushed an old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs. I also love him as the good guy/doctor/cop in Panic in the Streets (1950, directed by Elia Kazan), up against Jack Palance's particular brand of bad guy. He had a long, respected career and I'll stop almost anything to watch a movie if he's in it.

Tonight I have a lot of baking to do, so I knew I wasn't going to prepare myself anything too complicated. Then I espied a can of sardines in the cupboard. I thought of my dad and Richard Widmark and pulled them out. One of my dad's themes is the healthiness of fish oils and sardines in particular. Wise man. However it can be a challenge to get a kid to eat them so my dad turned them into a joke. He would mash up a can of sardines, throw in some mayo and put them on toast. He'd often dice some cucumber and throw that in too. He then dubbed it "compote d'herring", which he would declaim - and still does - in a thick French accent. I have to tell you, it's very tasty.

So tonight, I had compote d'herring on toast with a cup of tea and watched a bit of Kiss of Death as the first layer for Saturday's big cake baked.

Thank you Richard Widmark and thank you Pop!

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Four

We spent most of the day on the cake and got all the decorative tiles finished. Yay!

Below: Laura pipes between the burgundy and white petals to create some emphasis.

Below: James shades the leaves with tinted piping gel (all edible).

Post-flooding, Laura repipes the stems and outlines the leaves.

Below: James pipes finishing touches on the leaf tiles.



Below: James pipes the outlines of the lettering for the cake. Once the outlines were dry, the letters were flooded with softer icing, but it will all dry hard.



Below: The finished leaf tiles.



Below: The finished flower tiles.

Below: finished lettering.



The cake board has been covered with fondant. Later this week I will bake the lemon cake layers and hope to have the cake assembled by Saturday morning. Lemon curd will be spread between the layers and the cake will be covered with cooked buttercream. Laura and James will return Saturday for us to finish the decorating. They'll also be building a box for transportation. We've yet to find one we can buy that really does the job. It has to be a very secure box and not too awkward for the strong arm of the team (James) to carry.

Below is the life-size printout of the cake design. You can see the side bits as well.

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Three

It was a busy day for the cake, probably the worst day as doing flooded icing can be so tiring, especially when you don't do it too often. Laura and James arrived about 10am and after a cup of tea we got going. We traced the basic outlines of the tiles onto parchment, making about 40 of each of the two tiles. We'll only need just over half that, but it's good to have some back ups!

Here Laura has some outlined tiles with firm royal icing and is starting to flood... which is to say she is filling the outlines with softer, more runny royal icing.



Flooding is very hard on the hands. You squeeze and squeeze that piping bag. We got terrific cramps and took turns spelling each other off. You can see below how hard Laura was squeezing that piping bag.



Here are the tiles in their first iteration, resting up on my bed. (They'll be moved to the spare bedroom tonight so I can sleep!) There is still a lot of work to be done to them to bring them to life. That will be Sunday. Yet again, Laura and James prove to be the most wonderful collaborators.

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part Two

I think we've settled on this tile design, known as "Longden", attributed to Philip Webb, c. 1870, from Morris Marshall Faulkner & Co. The original 4-up tile was 6" square. We are going to make the individual quarters into 3" tiles. We're doing a smaller cake this year, as we think this event will be a bit more intimate. A 15" cake on a 19" square board. 5 tiles across by 5 equals 25 tiles plus 20 more for the sides (which measure 3" tall).

The Big Cake Project 2008 - Part One

Some of you may have been following last year when Laura and I made our "Viking Ship" cake inspired by Edward Burne-Jones' stained glass design.

Well, it's that time again, and the Big Cake Project 2008 is on.

Watch this space for more details.

In the meantime, here are the last three cakes we made for the same annual event. The first two, "Trellis" and "Fruit" are based on William Morris patterns, and the third is "Viking Ship." The top image shows the original inspiration, the second image down is the finished cake as we interpreted the design, and the third image shows a detail of the finished cake. Click on the image to enlarge.