50th Wedding Anniversary

Ohhhh, how pretty! I love cakes with flowers, and pink to boot. What a lovely combination. I loved making this cake!

It was a raspberry and white chocolate mud cake, layered with white chocolate ganache and raspberry jam and, I am not too shy to say, it was divine. I have been tweaking this recipe for a while and each time it tastes better. I may need to keep tweaking just to invent reasons to eat it. :)

This cake was ordered by my former boss, Megan, from my former marketing life. She, along with some other former collegues, have been following my Alice Springs cake journey over the last couple of years, so when I came back to Melbourne, they have all been so supportive and decided to try the real thing.

Her mum and dad have been married for 50 years and were having a celebration. They had pink water lillies in their original wedding so we decided to keep the theme, along with a "wedding cake" tier look.

The cake is actually white but because my cake room is pink, I think all the pink in the room and on the cake reflected back on to the cake so it looks pink!

The large flower on the top was hand cut and assembled, the others were made using a daisy cutter and some imagination! Anyone who knows me, or has been following the blog, will know that sugar flowers make me shake in fear. I have mentioned that I need to conquer them this year, so I guess, I am off to a good start.

My main problem with flowers is that they are so delicate and breakable. I am always breaking them. Maybe my home made flower paste is too soft. But also, I am not the most delicate petal going around myself. So this combination saw me making and pulling apart and making the top flower THREE times. URRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHH!

Everytime someone mentions flowers on a cake, I find it hard to breathe. I am definitely going to work on this. It will not break me! I will be fine! LOL. :)

Happy 50th Anniversary Ken and Norma.  Something to aspire to.

The Courthouse cake

Last week, I had the pleasure and professional challenge of building my first court house replica.

The local courthouse, which is now an information centre, turned 150 this week and wanted to mark the day with a celebration. I have displayed some cakes there in the past, so they asked me to quote on a cake for them.

The week spent building the cake coincided with one of the hottest, humid weeks the Mornington Peninsula has seen for some time. It was also the week my air conditioning was installed. Yay!....But alas..... it blew up within 24 hours.

Despair. I managed to get the cake carved and ganached before it blew up but the covering of the cake in fondant occured in 96% humidity. I quickly transported the cake to the inlaws and continued work there. The poor cake was sweating, along with its maker.

Once the humidity left us, the rain came. I needed to make a site visit and make some notes but it was raining so bad even the kids refused to leave the car. LOL!

Luckily, I had enough photos to go on, although one night I snuck down to the courthouse and did a walk around to double check before continuing! The detail in replicas are amazing and incredibly time consuming. It took around 15 hours work, 3 mud cakes, 2kg of ganache and I seriously under quoted it but I am learning as I go and have made notes for next time!

It was a fantastic experience and to quote the event organiser I "exceeded their expections" and the cake and some committee members made it into the local paper. Great result.

Merry Christmas!

Short and sweet today. Here are two cakes I made for love!

The first is for my father in law to take to his volunteer job at the local old Courthouse in Mornington, where we have an information centre, staff entirely by volunteers.

I thought they deserved a special cake this christmas. The cake itself is strawberry white chocolate mud cake layered with white chocolate ganache and strawberry jam.

All the decorations are made from fondant, including the bow/ribbon.

Enjoy Norm and the vollies!

The second cake is for the Workaholic's workplace. It started off its life going to be a white covered cake with a 3d christmas tree with presents around the base and a snowman on the top.

But I was watching/listening to the Channel 7 Domain Carols on Saturday night while I was doing these two cakes and looked up and saw their visual identity and wanted to give it a go. Talk about design and execute on the fly!

I just checked in at every ad break to see if I had it vaguely right. LOL! I then added the tree base and the balls around the bottom.

Often people have a theme or an invitation design for their event that they would like transferred or carried through on a cake. I guess this is what happened here!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas................

How much fun is christmas? I love this time of year. In fact, I am sure I blabbed on about how much I love christmas in this blog twelve months ago, so I will try and keep this short and sweet.

I have been fairly slack this christmas with my baking and christmas preparation in general. Just so much going on - renovations for my cake room, end of year school functions, parties, life. All the stuff that other people have too but it has caught up with me this year. Just doesn't seem to be enough hours in the day. It is so bad, that for the first time EVER, I have not written a single christmas card. So, if you are expecting one from me, "Merry Christmas, hope it's a good one and can I please have this year off? I promise I will be good next year!" Thanks!

I did spend a late night during the week making a present for Oscar's teacher. You know I could never buy something, I have to bake it, create it or something silly like that.

So these are the results. Tada! I may have said this before, but I will say it again. Designed, individual face cupcakes like these take an incredible long time to do. They are so fiddly, time just rushes by. I know some fellow cake people charge $20 each for these. I used to think that was OTT, now I think they are being generous. I may just act like a supermodel in regards to these individual babies and say I wont get out of bed to make them for anything less than $X. Ah, funny.

Anyway, these are so cute, I would do them again in a heartbeat. They seem to take on their own personality.

Oh Max!

Oh, I had such fun with this cake. For those of you old enough (but ageing gracefully, thankyou!), you will recognise the theme from a popular American TV series - Get Smart.

An old work friend, Liz, contacted me when I was still in Alice Springs, lamenting that I wouldn't be around in Melbourne to make her partner's 50th cake. Well, as circumstances have it, I was, and I am glad I was, it was a beauty to work on.

When talking to me about designs for the cake, they were just wanting a small shoe phone on top of a cake in a very minimal way with some writing on it. I said "how about the shoe is the cake" and off we went. And so did lots of big ideas!

At first, I thought I had bit off more than I could chew (nooooo, you? I hear you say!). But I got right into the research of the old episodes, the Workaholic's brain (which is full of old TV, he watched ALOT when he was young, misspent youth and all that), and various fan websites.

The more I researched, the more the cake grew. Really, I could have gone silly on this but I had quoted the cake based on the original design and as much as Liz and Trev are a gorgeous couple and I enjoyed making this one and taking a hit on the costings, there was a limit.

The Workaholic, now he is not so much of a Workaholic, keeps sticking his nose into my cake designs and he actually finessed this design for me on the run. Turning into quite the apprentice he is.

So, to refresh your memory on Get Smart, what you see on the cake is:

• the red line leading Max into the building at the opening of the show
• the first of a series of doors, this one is meant to look like lift doors, but actually open up into a stair case
• brick walls signifying the hallway and walls around the doors
• one of the secret agents in a letterbox. It could have been a phone box, locker, cupboard, washing machine, ship fog horn etc. Options were endless. They were always in the most bizarre spots.
• the cone of silence. According to much of the footage I watched, this changed a number of times, sometimes the Chief and Max sat together under the plastic and other times they had their own domes.
• the shoe phone. This was the hardest to find pictures on for reference. I have no idea why. There are also a number of versions of this phone but I decided to go with the earliest version.
• a classic line from the show

I adored making this cake. It was quite big in the end. The bottom cake was a 10inch square turned into a 15 inch by 10 inch rectangle. The shoe phone was a 8 inch square but I finished up probably only using half of it.

Somewhere along the line, although I started of doing classic formal cakes, I have morphed into quite a bit of novelty. Not sure which I like the best yet. Just have to keep experimenting!

Beer o'clock

This cake was lots of fun.

It was ordered by a work collegue from my previous life in Marketing, many years ago.

Her best friend, who is turning 30, has a thirst for beer. Unfortunately, she is pregnant at the moment and can not enjoy her beverage of choice on her 30th.

This was the next best thing.

The cake itself was a white chocolate mud. The beer bottle is modelled from fondant and is edible. The colours covering the cake tie into the colours on the beer label. The beer label was a bit of a cheat job, but effective- it is soaked off a real beer bottle and stuck on the bottle.  One day I will get around to trying a icing print sheet!

Dessert Table - farewell Alice Springs :(

Okay, this is going to be a tough one to write. Not just because it is almost three months after the event, but because it is safe to say that deciding to leave Alice Springs was one of the toughest decisions the Workaholic and I have made in our 11 years together.

We love Alice Springs and the Northern Territory. Our lives, values, dreams and a whole lot more changed for the better when we moved to Alice Springs. The outback just suited us. The people suited us. We miss it everyday.

Someone, who had returned from 8 years in the outback said that to me once, that she missed it everyday, before we lived in Alice Springs, and I thought "well, if you miss it that much, go back, it's that easy". Oh, how niave I was, how uneducated. I cringe now at that thought! I wish it was that easy! (I apologise for my thoughts, Jo ;).)

But it's not easy, it's complicated. Complicated by kids and extended families living in other States and opportunities for kids that are completely different to opportunities in Alice. I still haven't figured out which opportunity is best, and I don't think I will ever know. What is good in Alice is bad in Melbourne and what is good in Melbourne is bad in Alice. Or something like that. It is not black and white. They are polar opposites, neither right nor wrong. Complicated!

Alice, the place just gets under your skin, it calls to you. And those that don't live there are going to think I am nuts. But it is magic. The indigenous people of Central Australia know what I am talking about. Many of our Aboriginal friends have said to us in our final weeks, "them ranges will have you back". And I am sure they are right. We will be back, even if it is in many years to come. There is a belief in Alice that if you see the Todd river flow three times you will stay for life. We saw it flow many more times than that. My brother thinks we singlehandly broke the drought when we moved there! We will be back.

Anyway, I needed to farewell the Workaholic's workplace with a bang. They had been so much of our lives for 3 years. They had tasted everything I had baked while reigniting my passion to bake. They had shared our family and my husband. Many of them laughed with us, cried with us, camped with us and will be friends for years to come.

I decided to make the final bake about everything my Workaholic loves as well as the thing that started this whole "Baked by Kate" thing - cupcakes. So, I searched around for lollies, and lots of them. The Workaholic loves them. There was not a lollipop to be found in Alice Springs, so I sent away to Adelaide. I cobbled together trays and jars and lollies from everywhere. Then I made my own fudge for the first time ever. Between me and you, I don't see the point. But the Workaholic loves it.

The office loved it, I even provided lollie bags for them to take home to their families. Sugar highs all round town that day. It was a great send off, our kids where there, as they have been throughout this journey.It took them a couple of hours to come down from the sugar. Poor mites.

Dessert Tables are all the rage at the moment, so I got to experiment again. To be honest, it was hard work. Supplies are thin on the ground. Having been back in a major city, I can see that it all could have been pulled together in a mere few hours here, with much more aplomb.

However, isn't that just the point of the whole Alice Springs experience and why we love it so much -  it's not about having everything you could ever need, it's about trying to make a difference to those who have so much less and that we all muck in and help each other out. It's about community.

At the time of baking for the event, this was just to be a "change of jobs" farewell, not a farewell from town, however during a holiday up to the top end directly after the party, we spur of the moment decided to leave the Territory the way we came - very quickly!

So it is with much sadness and fond memories I say goodbye to Alice Springs.

Thank you, you have made me the person I am today.

See you next time mate!