Gardeners World

This weeks bake was for a 70th birthday-garden theme. There's a lot you can do with a garden theme, so it was quite fun to brainstorm ideas and to get the ball rolling.

So here's the recipe and the method and some top tips of where to get your decorations that are just to fiddly and time consuming to make, especially when your under time pressure!

Ingredients:

8oz Butter

8oz Caster Sugar

4 Eggs

8oz Self Raising Flour

1tsp Vanilla Essence

Jam (to fill)

Appropriate Icings (1kg pack of white ready to roll icing should be sufficient).

Method:

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees Celsius and line a 9inch square tin. 

Beat together the butter and the sugar until they become light and fluffy and creamy in colour. Add the eggs one at a time. Then carefully fold in the flour until all the mixture is combined, it should be a pale yellow colour at this point. Add the vanilla essence into the bowl and mix again.

The next thing you need to do is to scoop the mixture into the cake tin until the tin is approximately three-quarters full. Then smooth the mix down a little with a palette knife or a spoon and pop in the oven for 40-45 minutes or until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. 

Once baked, leave in the tin to cool a little before removing and placing onto a cooling rack to cool completely. 

Loosen up your jam in a bowl until it is runny enough to spread smoothly over one of the layers of cake, if its too thick and stiff it will just rip the sponge.

When the sponge is fully cool, slice it in half.

Then sandwich the cakes back together into one sponge and set to one side.

To decorate, roll out your desired icing to approximately 5mm thick (I used green but if you want to do a different theme for your cake, pick whichever colour works best for you!) and layer over your cake. If cracks begin to appear, don't worry, as you can easily smooth them out. All you need to do is get some icing sugar on the palm of your hand and rub your hand in circular motions wherever the crack or blemish is, until it is removed. Simple!

Now for the decorations!

I ordered the little gardening tools box and the gardener from The Craft Company, as I literally had no spare time to make these fiddly little bits. This website is honestly a life saver-you can order decorations, ribbon, cake boards and boxes, the world is your oyster! Plus, if you order before 3pm its next day delivery-sweet!

I made some little carrots to go on top of my cake, simply by colouring some icing orange and rolling into little cylinders and pinching one end. Then just pop a bit of green on top, and Bob's your uncle, you have a carrot!

Now for the final touches! Writing on a cake is always the hardest part for me, especially onto white icing. There's just so much possibility of it going wrong, and if you have shaky hands like I do, it can be even more daunting! But all you need to do is just think of the words you need  to write and just do it. If you think about it too much, that's when things start to go wrong!

I tried out some new edible ink pens for this cake to write Happy Birthday, which I purchased from Lakeland, and they're pretty awesome. They are definitely worth the purchase!
And there you have it. A cake for a keen gardener!

I hope you guys have an epic week, and as always, happy baking.

Charley x