My First Cake

The baking was starting to get a hold of me; I wanted to bake, all I needed was a good excuse.  This is why my mum, my daughter and my mum's neighbour come in to the story.  My eldest daughter is just about to start secondary school and her uniform was/is mega expensive.  The blazer alone cost £25.00.  But one day my mum phoned and said that her neighbour daughter had grown out of hers and was offering it to us for free.  My mum suggested that I bake her a cake (I suspect that she meant this in a jokey way, but it sparked my imagination.

I could see the cake in my head, a fondant school blazer on top and I wanted wanted wanted to make it.  I didn't have all the ingredients for the cake, so I started with the blazer.  I had a little dark blue fondant already so it copied a photo from the internet which was the right size and cut the separate bits out.  It was tricky cutting the bits out and the cuts looks untidy.  I rounded the corners with my fingers and stuck the bits together with water and used a the icing pipe to add the white bits.(this was hard as I used the icing sugar/water variety of icing) Then in the fridge it went ready for the next day.

My fondant blazer

I remembered tips from the internet, such and rubbing butter on the tin and then covering it in flour to stop the cake cooking so I was pretty sure this cake would be fabulous.

When the cake came out it hadn't risen very well, but that's been a problem with all the cakes I've ever made but I wasn't worried.  I was careful not to open the oven while the cake was in the first half of it's cooking time, so I knew that this was not what was stopping my cake from rising. It had to be the recipe and I could always find a better one.

I ran a long metal spatula around the edge of the cake to loosen it and tipped it out on the cooking rack. The top half of the cake fell out and the bottom half stayed in the tin.  Cursing I got the rest of the cake out and left it to cool.  Maybe half an hour later it was still warmish, but no longer hot, so I started on the butter icing.

This bit was easy, although I did gets a few lumps in the icing and my electric whisk blew icing sugar all over me and my kitchen.  

By then the cake had cooled a little so I grabbed a bread knife to cut it in half so I could fill it with butter cream and jam.  This was a little messy, what with the cake already being in several pieces.  As I lifted the top piece off, it too broke in half, leaving me with a bottom half that was missing a bit of it's side and a top in two sections. I slapped it all together with butter cream and jam and then cemented the sides all back in place; it was a little lumpy but would do.

The icing ripped as I put it over the top, but I poked it into place, piped a  little butter icing around the edge and my first cake was done.

Apparently it tasted very nice, but I have no actual proof of that.

The finished cake