At Last!

A picture-heavy post today, while I get all the pre-Nikon photos out of my system (oh, those childish days of yore!). And yes, this is mostly an excuse to get over-excited over the food from my party, which I'm sure no one is as interested about as I am XD. So let's kick off.

1. Cake balls! And let me point out that Morgana made it look far to easy in this post to do other shapes. My cupcake bites turned out fine, but I struggled to get more ambitious. I did find out I had a previously undiscovered knack for making skulls out of pieces of cake! -- which I'm sure any decent psychologist could draw a conclusion from, haha.

'Chocolate cake covering' is a bit of an unknown entity to me (probably a cross-Atlantic thing) so I had to use actual chocolate; obviously damn expensive in the quantity I needed. I improvised a bit and was a bit stingy in places, and for the red hearts I tried using royal icing, which mostly worked. It did look great and hardened up fine, but one was enough to make your head literally buzz from the sugar rush, heh. I'd cut down the sugar in the cream cheese frosting if I was going to coat with royal icing again.

I do admit I began to doubt that the effort was worth it, right up until my friend Leah grabbed me mid-party brandishing a cupcake bite and announced, 'this is-- this is a FOODGASM, that's what this is!!'. Whaat, I like feedback.

Cake balls recipe here.

2. Jam tarts. With frozen pastry and bought jam, obviously, but I admit I kind of love how simple and cute these are. The heart tarts are made with raspberry jam, and the spades are black cherry.

You don't need a recipe for these, but aren't they adorable?

3. Chequercake. This wasn't for my actual party, but I said I'd tell you how to make it, so here it is. You'll just need one chocolate cake and one regular sponge, and a load of buttercream (I can't remember the proportions I used, but you can improvise that and just make more if you need it).

You'll also need round cookie cutters in various sizes and/or a small plate or bowl to cut around. You use these to cut both cakes into circles, keeping all your cut-out pieces to one side. Then you should be able to slot your alternating colours of cake into each other, like below.

You're going to want to seal these up with a pretty decent amount of frosting, or the cake'll just collapse when it's cut. Do this with both cakes, then slather the top with frosting and put the second, alternate layer on top:

Decorate the cake however you want, and when you cut it it should look like a chessboard (left). I was going to decorate it with chess pieces over the top, but we only have tiny little ones or my dad's enormous marble set, which I thought might punch straight through the cake, haha. Siigh.

4. My favourite last: sugar cookies! Simplest thing ever, use your own favourite recipe &c. &c. ad nauseum. But I spent far too many happy hours playing with these.

My favourite: dalek cookie!


Vvworp, vworp!

Noah's ark?

...This is why you should never eat the food I offer you. There's a high chance I've acted out the plot of several Doctor Who episodes and a couple of biblical tales with them.