2006 Gipsy Moth cake stall

When I moved to London I got a job at The Gipsy Moth in Greenwich. It has a very big beer garden and my boss let me do a cake stall there as part of Car Free Day. They close off the road into Greenwich and there are lots of events in the village.



I made macaroons for the first time, using lemon pastry and putting jam in the base. I love coconut, but they weren't the most popular thing on the stall.



I also make fruit cake to my Grandmas recipe.



On the stall from left to right.
Back row: vegan carrot cake, date flapjack, lemon cake, brownie and my co league Lex's chocolate orange cake.
Front row: macaroons, coconut loaf, fruit loaf, Victoria sponge cake, chocolate death cake, coffee and walnut cake, chocolate buns, chocolate chip cookies, butterfly buns.

2006 First cake stall

My friend Joanne found a street fair in Shoreditch and thought it would be fun to do cake stall together. We had moved to London a few months before and got very excited and baked A LOT of things. The picture above is my cakes invading my flatmates room and below the kitchen.





I made a sign 'The Taste' taken from Purple Rain. Bad name!



We grossly overestimated the amount we would need and who would go to the market. It turned out that we were in a very underprivileged area and we made everything 30p. We sold everything.

Orange, ginger and treacle sponge

I love this picture - floating sponge!
It was cold, and dark and I fancied a pudding, so a little foolishly i decided to make a sponge at about 8pm. Bearing in mind it takes a good few hours to cook, it was well worth the wait. Sponge pudding is extremely economical with this (one litre, i think) pudding only using one egg and 2oz marg.
I have very fond memories of my mum making sponges. Usually treacle or ginger, so I combined the two with a bit of orange. Yum yum yum.

23/09/2009 Baked Po-cake-o

The story behind this cake is a strange one. I was talking about making my friend Jane a cake for her birthday and Yuki at my work told me about a book her friend has that has potato cakes in it, as in a cake that looks like a potato, rather than the the Irish ones. She said they look like soiled potato's out of the ground. I thought this was an incredible idea, and very weird. I got a little carried away with the idea of a baked potato cake and here is the result...



I baked a wholemeal sponge cake fashioned it into a potato shape then covered it in buttercream, adding more on top. I then rolled marzipan with the bottom side in cocoa. I then wrapped the potato in it's marzipan jacket and artfully drizzled/ spread it with melted dark chocolate and put it in the fridge. I then slit and pushed it as you would a normal jacket.



I charmed the man in the kebab shop and he gave me a takeaway carton. You can see the scale of the potato because it's busting out of the tray. I grated marzipan to make the cheese and I had made marzipan beans the night before so that they hardened. I then heated up some jam and mixed the 'beans' in. Jacket po-cake-o with cheese and beans was born!




I finished it off with a plastic fork and took it to the pub for Jane to eat!

21/05/2009 Giant fondant fancy

I had never made fondant icing, and it took me a while to find a recipe that I thought would create the right effect. As this photo shows, it melted the buttercream a bit and splurged all over the place.



The cake was an angel sponge. I sliced each layer in half and sandwiched jam and buttercream alternately. then I covered the whole lot in the buttercream which a big mound in the centre. Then fondant icing, and chocolate drizzled on top.



This is a giant fondant fancy that i made for my friend Kate's birthday. This was the first in my themed birthday cake stretch that I had this year. The photo's are a bit shaky, but hopefully you get the idea.

06/10/2009 Chocolate Brazil nut cake

These are some bad pictures of a grown-up looking chocolate loaf cake that I made for Erik's birthday. I put chopped Brazil nuts and silver balls on top for decoration. I had had a run of themed birthday cakes so by comparison this looked a bit serious. It travelled to the pub with me, and got a little squished on the way.

22/08/09 Chocolate custard cake

This is a chocolate custard cake (from Nigella) that I made for my sister's birthday. It was pretty short notice, and I'd been meaning to make this cake for ages. It was nice, and very simple because you can do it all in a blender, but I think I could make it a little bit more custardy and there was a lot, lot, lot of icing. I took it to Harvey Nichols for after our tea and all the waiting staff were very jealous.

12/10/2009 Christmas cake

I soaked 3lb 10oz of fruit in 1/3 bottle of sherry and a very big slosh of port on Tuesday 6th and made my Christmas cakes for this year on Monday.





This will be my best documented year yet! Above are the cake done and out of the oven. Below the cakes have been spiked with more sherry and port, wrapped up and stored. I will water them every week until I ice them in December.

12/2008 Christmas cake at the cake stall

These are slices of Christmas cake individually wrapped for sale on mine and Claire's cake stall at Columbia Road flower market last Christmas. I also made cake triangles to sell. Claire and I no longer do the stall, but were thinking of doing some days this December.

24/12/2008 christmas cake

I did make Christmas cake in 2007, but don't have any photo's. These are the cakes, and how I wrapped them for my family last year. These were photographed under my mum's Christmas tree.

21/12/2006 Christmas cake triangles

This is the first Christmas cake I ever made. I made it because my mum hadn't made one in a few years and I wanted a home made one. I made it in the September from 2 recipes in two of my mums books. I didn't know which one she used so I just evened out the amounts and ingredients between the two. I made one cake into 5 so and gave the pieces as gifts to my family and my friend Joanne. I made my own marzipan, and iced it like thus...



I also made my own Royal Icing.I never realised that it spread because I had only ever seen it in rollable form. I was really pleased that I could make it go in peaks!

06/10/2007 Baked Alaska Flood

This is the baked Alaska that i made my friend Erik for his 30th birthday. It was my first attempt, can you tell? I make a Victoria Sponge and then plonked a tub of ice cream over the top, covered this with meringue and baked it. You can just see the sponge peeking out of the bottom. Success!

21/05/07 Victoria sponge and fresh blackberry 'jam'

This is a traditional Victoria sponge, except for the fresh blackberry jam. It's not really jam, more like stewed blackberries, hence the juice! I went around to see Kate for breakfast on her birthday with a few other friends and she got a lot of deer-related presents (she's a collector) so the photo's are more deer than cake-centric.

20/04/2007 Chocolate orange cake

I made this when some friends came around for dinner. It was based upon the Dan Lepard 'chocolate passion cake' recipe, which is a vegan cake. I amended the recipe to include orange juice in the cake batter and icing and decorated it with orange peel. I can't quite remember exactly how I did this, but writing this makes me want to try again. I'll post what I do.

03/07/2007 Chocolate 8 cake

My friend Claire is a projectionist and cinema enthusiast. She also sometimes puts on cinema events and for these she wanted to create her own film countdown. She asked a group of her friends to make numbers for the countdown. Here is mine, shown from the top and bottom of the cake. I actually got this wrong, I was supposed to do a 6! Claire photoshopped it into the correct thing.

21/05/06 walnut layer cake

This cake is a lot of firsts. This is the first recipe I ever made of Nigel Slaters. My then-flatmate Quil, had The Kitchen Diaries and I got very into reading it. It was also the first time I'd heard of golden caster/granulated sugar. From the picture where the cake has been cut you can see that it was a little bit sad in the middle, but that just left more room for icing! Now I'm writing this, this was a cake of firsts in many ways. I think this marks the time when I realised that i wanted to be a baker. Or 'make cakes' as i usually say. I made this for my friend Kate. This started the trend for me making everyone a cake for their birthday and as normal as this sounds, i didn't do that before this one.