Perusing beautiful foodie photographs on Instagram and Pinterest in the last few weeks I have been blown away by some of the fabulous and imaginative Easter baking pics popping up.
I felt I should add my humble offering to this parade of chocolate-coated, eggtastic cakery so with some actual spare time yesterday I decided to grasp the bunny by the ears and make my cake.
I decided to stay away from the creme-egg themed cooking. Better cooks than me have well and truly covered just about anything you could do to/with/around a creme egg.
Baking not being my strongest point I decided to keep it simple with a decorated sponge.
I say baking isn't my strong point. It always tastes nice but I often fall at the decorating stage. No patience you see. When I can smell fresh from the oven baking I just want to eat it ASAP.
I threw together a basic Victoria Sponge, filled with some beautiful strawberry and Champagne preserve and then dived head first into my cupboard in search of green food colouring for my icing.
Let me explain (insert wibbly-wobbly "going back in time" music of your choice here.)
Earlier in the day I had spotted some very cute chocolate bunnies in M&S (6 wrapped for £1.50). This gave me the idea of just piping some buttercream "grass" on top of my cake and adding bunnies. Et voila! Easter cake.
So, icing sugar- check. Butter- check. Green food colouring? Ah. Not check. The opposite of check.
Quick text to the neighbours failed to unearth colouring so it was back into the cupboard for me in hope that the tiny bottle had rolled out of sight.
No such luck but I did find some of those tubes of writing icing bought for someone's birthday with the idea the party guests could decorate biscuits.
There was a full green one so I figured it might just tint the icing enough to pass for grass. I squeezed the tube in and mixed it in. The icing went green..... but "what the hell is that smell?" I thought. Kind of like burning plastic.
My 9-year-old daughter standing by to "help" agreed it was not a nice smell. We thought maybe it was the food processor I was using to mix the icing. Then we tasted the icing.
YUK!!!!
At this point I thought to check the use by date on the icing tubes. It hadn't occurred to me that they could go off. They were indeed out of date by quite a long time.
So I was left with a dilemma. Did I abandon the project, wait til the morning and hope to find time to buy fresh ingredients for icing and decorate a stale cake? Or did I decorate the fresh cake and photograph it then scrape the icing off so we could eat the cake?
Dear reader I went for option 1. I wasn't sure I would have time later to finish the cake and I took inspiration from food stylists who cover food in all sorts of grim substances rendering the items beautiful to look at but inedible.
A neighbour arrived for dinner - admired the cake. I admitted that it was somewhat tainted and he gracefully declined my offer of a piece to try.
As we speak I have a friend en route for coffee who possibly saw my instagram post of my cake last night and is eagerly anticipating sampling some of my baking.
She can have some scraped cake but I'm sorry but, as it used to say in council parks, we must keep off the grass!
Disclaimer: This is NOT a sponsored post.
I felt I should add my humble offering to this parade of chocolate-coated, eggtastic cakery so with some actual spare time yesterday I decided to grasp the bunny by the ears and make my cake.
I decided to stay away from the creme-egg themed cooking. Better cooks than me have well and truly covered just about anything you could do to/with/around a creme egg.
Baking not being my strongest point I decided to keep it simple with a decorated sponge.
I say baking isn't my strong point. It always tastes nice but I often fall at the decorating stage. No patience you see. When I can smell fresh from the oven baking I just want to eat it ASAP.
I threw together a basic Victoria Sponge, filled with some beautiful strawberry and Champagne preserve and then dived head first into my cupboard in search of green food colouring for my icing.
Let me explain (insert wibbly-wobbly "going back in time" music of your choice here.)
Earlier in the day I had spotted some very cute chocolate bunnies in M&S (6 wrapped for £1.50). This gave me the idea of just piping some buttercream "grass" on top of my cake and adding bunnies. Et voila! Easter cake.
So, icing sugar- check. Butter- check. Green food colouring? Ah. Not check. The opposite of check.
Quick text to the neighbours failed to unearth colouring so it was back into the cupboard for me in hope that the tiny bottle had rolled out of sight.
No such luck but I did find some of those tubes of writing icing bought for someone's birthday with the idea the party guests could decorate biscuits.
There was a full green one so I figured it might just tint the icing enough to pass for grass. I squeezed the tube in and mixed it in. The icing went green..... but "what the hell is that smell?" I thought. Kind of like burning plastic.
My 9-year-old daughter standing by to "help" agreed it was not a nice smell. We thought maybe it was the food processor I was using to mix the icing. Then we tasted the icing.
YUK!!!!
At this point I thought to check the use by date on the icing tubes. It hadn't occurred to me that they could go off. They were indeed out of date by quite a long time.
So I was left with a dilemma. Did I abandon the project, wait til the morning and hope to find time to buy fresh ingredients for icing and decorate a stale cake? Or did I decorate the fresh cake and photograph it then scrape the icing off so we could eat the cake?
Dear reader I went for option 1. I wasn't sure I would have time later to finish the cake and I took inspiration from food stylists who cover food in all sorts of grim substances rendering the items beautiful to look at but inedible.
A neighbour arrived for dinner - admired the cake. I admitted that it was somewhat tainted and he gracefully declined my offer of a piece to try.
As we speak I have a friend en route for coffee who possibly saw my instagram post of my cake last night and is eagerly anticipating sampling some of my baking.
She can have some scraped cake but I'm sorry but, as it used to say in council parks, we must keep off the grass!
Disclaimer: This is NOT a sponsored post.
