Kerrys Cake

Hi

I decided to have a go at something a bit different for my sisters birthday cake this year, after getting inspiration from the ASDA magazine, as pictured, I wanted to make a multicoloured sponge containing sweets. 

It wasn't as technical as I thought it was going to be, although colouring the sponge was really difficult as liquid food colouring is not the same as it was in the 1990s, you need so much more to get the desired colouring, next time I will use the pastes. 

I made the usual amount of cake mixture, which was 12oz, so I used 12oz of everything, I learned a while ago to weigh the eggs, then get everything else to weigh the same. However, if you are using baking powder, reduce the flour a tad to reduce the risk if it being dry. 

I also learned by making this cake that adding loads of food colouring does have an effect on the consistency of the sponge as they were a bit firmer than I would have liked, and heavier. Im guessing that using a paste colouring may solve this problem. 

I spread the mixture into 4 bowls, and coloured each one accordingly, hahaha, as you can see, I have red, yellow, blue and purple (Pink, babypoo yellow, grey and brown). 

I used the same size cake tin, and baked a thin cake each time, around half the height of a regular cake half each time. beware they dont take as long to cook as a full cake would. 

Once the cake was cooled, I used a cookie cutter to cut a circle through three of the layers, leaving the one you want on the top section uncut. 

I made buttercream filling and stacked the three pieces with the circles cut out, I filled it with as many sweets as I could, I used smarties and dolly mixture as they are all bright colours. I then added buttercream again to put the top on. 

By the time it came to doing the outside icing, it was a very hot evening, and I barely had any food colouring left, so I decided to go with a solid colour, so that cutting into the cake would be a surprise seeing the multicoloured effect and the sweets. 

I was pleased at how it turned out and she loved it. Even though it was hard to cut, she was thinking, omg this cake is so hard! haha, it was the sweets. I will have another go at a rainbow cake when I can afford to get the food colouring paste, it is mega expensive. 

Mrs P x

Really Easy Fruit Lollies

So, we have quite an abundance of our accidental raspberries without using much else in the way of ingredients as there are lots of recipes out there for fruit lollies and I don't usually have much in stock, we didn't plant them, they just grow every year, so we left them. We are picking a bowl full a night at the moment, I'm finding them too sharp to eat as they are, most people would just eat them like this but I have been looking for other ways to use them. I bought some new lolly moulds the other day and thought I would make some lollies with the raspberries and whatever else I could find. 

Last Night's Harvest

I started by mashing the raspberries up, and putting them in a saucepan, heating over a low heat until it was mostly liquid, this only takes a couple of minutes, don't let it boil. I then sieved the mixture, and pushed through the sieve as much as possible with my spoon. The remainder was mostly seeds. 

It did not produce as much juice as I would have hoped from that little bowl the jug pictured had around half the amount shown as raspberry juice, I topped it up a little with water, this would also help to take the edge off the sharpness of the raspberries. 

As you can see, I carefully measured it out equally into the compartments of the Lolly mould, he he. Oh well, it ended up even after I had leveled them out. I topped them up with a little orange juice. 

I put them in the freezer last night and we had one each tonight, they were great :)