Happy First Canadian Thanksgiving

So we finally made it to Canada. For the first time ever, I got to experience a Thanksgiving (we know of them in the UK, but we just take the ‘shopping sales’ aspect of it and leave the giving of the thanks to the Canadians and Americans – in November-), so did what I know best: got in the kitchen and baked.

These little delights are chocolate, with an orange buttercream ‘fire’, mini salted pretzel sticks and mini mallows – yes, a Pinterest inspired treat. I used Chipits (this was a risk, I’ve never used anything but Tesco chocolate for melting and baking before!) and melted them in a pan, but just enough to add some moisture to the cake and left little chunks in the mix. Was a nice little surprise biting in and finding a Chipit chunk in my cupcake! Something I will definitely do again.

They took some attempts to get right though. I started by ‘twirling’ (not a clue what the technical term would be!) the buttercream and placing the pretzel sticks against it. But this didn’t give the desired ‘fire’ effect at all! So I tried again. This time, I still ‘twirled’ the buttercream in the centre of the cake and used it as a base to ‘brush’ the buttercream up against it to give an almost ‘flame-like’ look. This seemed to work much better!

Next time, I need to get my food colouring ratio right, as I wanted a mix of colours for the flames, but for a first-timer, they weren’t that bad! Tasted scrummy too! Especially with the mix of sweet from the chocolate and salty from the pretzel.

Happy 60th.

This has got to be my absolute favourite cake I’ve ever made. The pirate of 2013 was pretty good, the (not featured on this blog, unfortunately) 3-tier mountain/snowboarder/ski lift cake of the same year was incredible (if I may say so myself) and the mountain-bear cake of 2018 is top of the list for sure, but this, this cake was something I’ve never tried before.

I’d watched countless Pinterest and Instagram videos and tutorials about how to make the striped buttercream wrap around the cake, and smooth it down and I as desperate to try it. Finally the opportunity presented itself when I had to make a surprise 60th birthday cake.

The cake was something I’d perfected over time: white chocolate and fresh strawberries. I made it as 2 large tray bakes and when chilled, cut them into circles with a cake tin. I found that this was much easier, not just because I got a few leftovers to nibble on and share, but because I got a smoother edge to work with and the top was much flatter than if I’d have used 2 circular cake tins.

The layer inside is just vanilla buttercream and strawberry jam, to compliment the white chocolate and fresh strawberry cake.

I mixed some of the buttercream with red food colouring and left the other bowl ‘naturally’ yellow/white. I found French butter to be an absolute nightmare to work with for buttercream and couldn’t wait to get home to use some good ‘ol Stork! I then piped big lines all the way around the cake, changing the layers as I went. I travelled with a cake decorating kit (yes, I was just that prepared) and used the flat edge to smooth the buttercream around and merge the lines.

Then the pièce de résistance, or so I think, is the fresh fruit topping. We were lucky in France that the physalis still came with its leaves which adds another dimension to the cake, and I chopped a couple of strawberries for the edges and ‘casually threw’ some raspberries in the mix.

I just loved it.