This week's lesson - a cake made using a ring tin is not structurally sound.  

I decided to make a cake for friends who have become co-owners in an ice-cream shop.  My idea was to make a cake that looked like a bowl of ice-cream, with scoops of ice-cream on top.  I made a marble cake for the bowl (in the dreaded ring tin), and then three different flavoured cakes for the ice-cream - lemon, coffee and rum & raisin.  Coffee and rum & raisin were our favourite flavours at Milk Mo's opening on Friday night, so they seemed like a good idea.

All the cakes cooked well and didn't stick to the tin or anything.  So far so good.

Attempt number 1 - failed

The general idea was to shape the marble cake so that it looked like a bowl.  I managed this with a little help from my hubby.  Once it was nicely shaped, I covered it in chocolate buttercream.  At this stage the cake started to flatten a little. (Not structurally sound, remember?).  I thought that I could rescue it once I put the fondant icing on - surely it would help hold the shape.  I was wrong.  My 'bowl' ended up looking more like a squashed white apple pie- not a pretty sight.

So, I made another cake at 9.30pm last night.  I didn't quite learn my lesson the first time, and used the ring tin again.  The other problem was that I ran out of milk (and so went to the local petrol station at 9.45pm), and only just managed to find enough flour in the cupboard.  I gave up on the marble cake idea, and just went with a chocolate cake.

I had to wait for the cake to cool before I could cover it with fondant, and so made the buttercream icing for the ice-cream scoops.  While I was doing that, I used the last of my icing sugar (and so didn't have enough to make more buttercream to ice the main cake).

I live across the road from an IGA and so could have bought more icing sugar this morning, but as I woke up bright and early (at 6am) it wasn't open.  So I improvised and just skipped the buttercream and covered it with fondant.  So far so good - it starting squishing a little, but it wasn't too flat this time (I gave up on the bowl idea and just went with the round cake).

Attempt number 2 finished

Anyway, it all turned out ok, after a few more mishaps like running out of green fondant (thus the multi-coloured icing on the board).  I also wanted to have the Milk Mo's logo on the side of the cake, but after a number of attempts, I gave up!

So.. after an eventful evening and morning, I finished the cake at 9am to take to the guys at media engine at 10am.  At least it tasted good!  I vow to never use a ring tin for these types of cakes again.

Squashed white apple pie, anyone?

-N-