I thought I had started drafting this blog a few weeks ago where I was motivated enough to bring my laptop with me to a café. Needless to say, I discovered a couple of nights ago that there was no draft to speak of.
It’s been 2 months since I have last written and since then I have given myself a couple of creative challenges. The first was to create a couple of birthday cakes. A slightly larger one for celebrating and a smaller version with left over ingredients for the actual day.
This probably sounds pretty straight forward to someone who bakes and bakes well but for me it was a challenge. Don’t get me wrong, I am I think a decent ‘everyday kinda cook'. I’m not great at desserts but they are generally OK if kept simple and I set my mind to it. But these cakes were different. They were using ingredients and tools that I have not used before.
The challenge was to create a dinosaur cake using fondant. I watched so many YouTube videos that I lost count. After purchasing all the tools, ingredients and watching endless videos, I have a new appreciation for the art the goes into creating a bespoke cake.
The videos always make it look so simple, don’t they? That’s what I naively thought anyway until I got started on the sugar paste models. It’s a good thing I spoke to people and got the advice to start days or even a week ahead because I definitely needed the extra time. I started working on the dinosaur models several days ahead. The first two were too big. Three days later I finally had three figures that I could work with. The cake itself was baked two nights ahead and decorated the day before. And here is the result.
1st Cake (name removed)
A shaky start I give you with uncooked centres and a lot of patching up but overall I was happy with my first attempt. Happy I could patch up a lot of the cracks, wrinkles and holes! And as for jumping into another baking project, I think a bit of time out to recover would be a good idea.
