I'll admit, this one is less of a recipe and more of a decorating guide.

 

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It all started when the church secretary asked me to make a cake for the church's 30 Birthday.

"No worries," say I

"Oh, and it needs to be servable with tongs, to be Covid conforming," she adds breezily.

A cake to serve approximately 100 people, all of whom have different dietary requirements, and serve with tongs, yeah - No worries!

It didn't take me long to hit on the idea of a chocolate crackle cake, in the shape of those 'Celebration Biscuit Cakes' (or "Cream Tart Number/Letter Cakes')- here's the genius part though - square (or triangle) crackles for easy tessellation.

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Neapolitan Choc-Crackle Sundae Slice - for image credits and recipe see link                                                                                                 River City Bakery

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At first I thought 'Over-sized Ice-block molds', but they only came in sixes and were all sold out, anyway.

I found flat-pack favour boxes and put in a diagonal divider so that people weren't having to eat 5 cubic cm of chocolate crackles - they're also much more shapeable that way. If you're interested, the hypotenuse of a 5cm square is 7.02cm.

50 pieces of gloss card cut in to 5 x 7.02cm (this is why I have a Cricut).

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If you've never made Chocolate Crackles before, the recipe is on every Copha wrapper, but here it is anyway.

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The only changes I made were Gf. Rice Puffs, and five cups, instead of four.

The classic recipe makes 12 crackles, and this one averaged 13 boxes. I needed 4 packets of Copha.

In case of awkward corners, or people asking for a 'little slice', I also made 1/4 size crackles, by slotting two dividers with slits cut into them to make an 'X' shape.

Some of the half crackles might want to develop a curve along the hypotnenuse. Encourage this - you have six rounded corners on a 3 and 0 (if I'd done this, I probably wouldn't have ended up with that unphotogenic corner on my zero)

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After they were solid, I ripped the boxes off and arranged them in the shapes of '3' and '0' on the cake boards (the boards came in a pack of four, but were flimsy, so I super-glued two together for each number).

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Whoops!

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Next, was probably the least successful part: the idea was to cement the shapes together with fondant icing to stop them coming apart

Fondant icing- good.

I made marshmallow fondant - bad. 

If you're making this, I strongly recommend normal fondant. Don't get me wrong, when it's warm, it's lovely and soft beautifully malleable - but I was putting it onto a refrigerated cake - see the problem?

The idea was to make it look like a chocolate cake that had been drizzled with pink icing and had lots of pretty drips. It ended up looking worse than my first attempt at fondanting a cake (nearly 20 years ago).

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By Catherine Porter, found on Pinterest                                                                       Cue Homer Simpson "Oh, why doesn't mine look like that?"

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To make matters worse, I accidently microwaved one blob (technical term)  of the fondant for 1:00, not 0:10. It wasn't burnt, but it was unusable, which gave me less room for error: the 0 in particular looked like Frankenstein's patchwork.

Fortunately, the 'Celebration Biscuit Cake' style is all about smothering the 'Cake' until it dies of sugar related injuries.

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Maker unknown: found here

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A few days earlier I made some icing flowers using Russian piping tips - I'm still pretty much a novice.

Best tip:

 If you don't want them to look like barnacles: the more holes in the middle the better (or none).

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I made two shades of pastel orange (peach and apricot, say), two pastel pink and two shades of lilac buttercream, and two of yellow, scraped in small layers into a piping bag to create a multicoloured effect. 

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Here's some I prepared earlier

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Buttercream

500g icing sugar/mixture

125g butter (I use salted, I think it tastes better), softened

Vanilla essence

water (just a bit)

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1. Beat the butter until smooth

2. Slowly beat in the icing sugar (sifted)

3. Add Vanilla to taste

4. Slowly add water while beating until a soft paste is formed.

5. Beat on high, scraping the bowl down at intervals until it is ivory coloured. 

x 2

I tried experimenting with having the yellow in a separate bag with the rest of the colours around it - it looked good, but wasn't worth the hassle of trying to squeeze two bags, or putting the icing around the inner tube.

I froze my Russian icing flowers so a) I could make them early and b) I could just pick the good ones.

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'Desert Rose' by Caroline Khoo

from the book I'm just here for Dessert

demonstrating the French/ Ball Cactus tip

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Now I took the second batch of buttercream (uncoloured) and using a variety of tips (one large round, one large 'French Tip' [the ones that make the really popular ball cactus type], small star, small round [these are the two I used to make the meringue wreaths below]) piped dots in wavy lines over the fondant - coincidentally covering up the scars...

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You will need about two thirds of one batch.

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Meringue Wreaths - inspired by Caroline Khoo

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by Caroline Khoo

from the book I'm just here for Dessert

 

Ok - I cheated, I used a bought meringue mix (I'm house sitting and they have nothing in their pantry)

I used a Wilton mix and was rather disappointed; the sugar just never seemed to dissolve.

I drew around the lid of a small jar (cayenne pepper, if you want to be specific) and piped stars and rounds

(fun fact: despite owning/inheriting a daft amount of piping tips only the star tip fits on one of the interchangers).

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Up until now, I've had very little success with the striped meringue look - I get one or two good looking ones and then the stripes just fade into oblivion. Clearly the trick is to use gel, not liquid colouring.

Well, it's obvious NOW...

I also made a few pale pink cactuses and simple kisses.

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Faux-carons/Psudo-rons/Dip O's

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From the blog, Like Mother, Like Daughter

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I saw this cute and 'simple' idea, when I was debating whether or not to make or buy macarons - they're very ubiquitous on this type of cake, but while I do have a great recipe, I haven't had much luck with colouring them. On the other hand, often the bought ones come in neon colours/ the classy ones sell out early, and you feel so pretentious ordering macarons.

These looked simple enough, get some fancy oreos, dip them in chocolate, and then maybe sprinkle some sprinkles.

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First try was to attempt to dip them in raspberry chocolate (not Ruby, raspberry - the milk powder from white chocolate is substituted with powdered raspberry) but my chocolate was old and remained a Nutella consistency.

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White chocolate it is.

The recipe suggested using forks to dip them, but, especially the 'Birthday Cake' oreos, just wanted to cleave and fall off the fork: I ended up dipping and putting them flat on baking paper, with 'heart' and 'mini sequin' sprinkles.

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Also featuring Arnott's mini Doughnut biscuits - AKA 'Dough-scuits'                           

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Review:

Strawberry oreos - sickly fake 'strawberry'

Red Velvet - Ok, but no real difference to classic.

Golden - Why did I put that in my mouth?

Birthday Cake - very nice, but not nearly as cool as the packaging.

In summary - I wish I'd got macarons, because now I have three packets of oreos hanging around.

 

I bought Arnott's new Doughnut biscuits in Strawberry - cue fake strawberry - but the icing was on the flat side, not the round side - seriously, how dumb can you be?

So I made mini doughnuts

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(Packet cake  - don't judge, it's not Bake Off)

Sadly, they didn't come from the pans as neatly as I would like, but I managed to salvage four or five and decorated with white and green glace icing (I know, looks like white on white, I just didn't want them to turn to toxic sludge) and then added Cherry Blossom coloured Konpeito.

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I iced the cake the night before, knowing that if I added meringues and the like, they would dissolve with condensation from the fridge. I added some raffellos, because I knew they wouldn't melt, and called it a night.

So I got up at six AM to let the icing warm to (cold) room temperature.

 

At 6.15 I bolt out of bed to an almighty crash.

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The two house-sitty-kitties have thrown their biscuit bowl of the bench.

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At 8am, the real work began.

As a rule of thumb, on assemblage cakes (i.e. lots of stuff all over) I add each element to one cake then the other, to maintain balance, large items one at a time, smaller two or three, then cycling back through the elements so I can keep an eye 'in real time' how things are looking.

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Final decorations:

Cherries, strawberries, Blackberries (highlighted with gold lustre dust)

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Mini Jersey Caramels (cut into triangle halves) and Candy Speckle Ball - from Coles Pick'n'Mix

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Bought icing flower (some Coles, some Lemon Tree)

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Mini lemon and orange slices from Lemon Tree

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I also tinted that last third of buttercream pale green and used it to pipe 'leaves'/ anchor points using my 'patented' leaf piping shape (You can actually buy them, but I've never seen them) - cut a 'V' in the tip of your piping bag, with the point pointing towards the wide end of the bag. In my opinion that's the only shape you can do well without a piping nozzle.

I added a sweep of rosegold/ gold lustre dusts to meringues and raffellos, and Bjorn Stronginthearm's your uncle.

They even made it to church without turning a hair, though I brought emergency decorations and leaf bag.

For the cutting I added IKEA tealights

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Here's some I prepared later

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