Cake ...

Knowing that WriteNight's anniversary meeting was coming up, I decided to bake a cake to celebrate.  

My friend Sonja and I baked two sponges - one vanilla and one chocolate.  We mixed up a vat of chocolate buttercream icing and stashed it in the fridge ready for the next day.

The following day, I carved the cakes into the shape of a book and added a chink of cake for the spine.  I glued it all together with chocolate buttercream and iced it all with fondant icing in blue and ivory.  

Here is the result.  It didn't last long!

Colchester Write Night Meeting

On December 10th, WriteNight celebrated its first anniversary and we decided to celebrate this landmark with a little party.  My friend Sonja Holmes and I made a cake in the shape of a book, as you can see below. 

In addition to many delicious baked foodstuffs and drinkies, we all completed an insane writing exercise, devised by the 'evil genius' Colin Murugiah.  

We each plucked four letters from a hat and came up with words starting with those letters.  All 49 words were then written down and we had to create a story containing all 49 of them.

The words were as follows:

blank,  fryer, green, prize, queen, golf, vehicle, fresh, orangutan, joy, angry, nodded, Nick, dance, sky, cedar, luscious, old, ugly, transmogrify, drum, excited, saliva, knife, Winter, Yule, usury, zombie, irritate, knickers, zero, pants, xenophobe, migraine, internalise, temperament, umbrella, rampant, existential, herbivore, snow, chocolate, oblivious, anxiety, starfish, jammy, dodgy, mercurial, pedagogical.

It was a very challenging but entertaining task.  Here is what I managed to come up with.  I have coloured the challenge words in green.

Disgruntled Zookeeper 

by Annie Bell 

"Pants!" I yelled as the hot fat spat from the fryer.  The aroma of frying chips filled my nostrils, causing a tsunami of saliva to build up.

As I waited for the fresh sticks of white potato to brown off, I cursed my recently self imposed herbivore diet.  Those chips would have been so much better, if they were enhanced by a tasty piece of fish.  

Working at the zoo had ruined me.  I couldn't bear to stand there at lunchtime, biting into a juicy quarter pounder, only to spot the wounded face of Queen Nick - the orangutan - gazing accusingly at me from behind his wall of glass.  It's not as if I was eating Daisy - the zoo cow!  Anyway, the guilt Queen Nick had imposed had somehow been internalised and I had transmogrified into this green eating zombie with a meat deprived, angry temperament and a zero tolerance approach to those pedagogical bastards with their blank expressions and their hands-on approach to primate development.  I'd show them a thing or two!

So back to my chips.  The tiny red marks from the fat spatters began to irritate.  I thought back to the strange events of that afternoon.

It had been an unfortunate day.  I'd woken up from a full scale, epic anxiety dream - you know - the sort where you realise, far too late, that you forgot to put your knickers on, before leaving the house.

Work had been average.  I'd taken great joy from winding up that mercurial little xenophobe Sergey, with his luscious lips, cedar aroma and bad attitude.  Jammy little git had just been awarded a top notch prize for new approaches to zookeeping.  I had done all the work for it but he, chocolate teapot that he was, had taken the credit for it.  The old witch in charge was utterly oblivious to the entire injustice and I had had enough.

With a migraine cooking my eyes and the fear of the odious usuries frm Barclays Bank coursing through my mind (my overdraft was a bit weighty), I headed for my vehicle.

As I stepped into the Winter chill, I was on the edge of an existential crisis.  The knife in my back was smarting and the sky looked dodgy; sort of grey and heavy.

My Golf sat waiting to carry me home. I climbed into the seat and turned the key.  The engine burst into life and the stereo followed suit.  My favourite band blared out.  'Ugly Starfish' rocked my world.  the beat of the drums entered my blood, aligning my pulse with their beat, until all I could do was to go ahead with that insane dance you can only do when driving.

It did strike me that a passing pedestrian might laugh as I nodded and headbanged my way home.

As I drove, the sky began to unburden itself, throwing feathery flakes of snow at my windscreen. Excited, I beamed.  It was almost Christmas.  Might we end up with a Yuletide blanket of snow and a nice payout for yours truly?  That'd be nice.

I parked my car and headed indoors, dancing rampantly to the noises in my head, my umbrella protecting me from the snow.

Suddenly, a toxic aroma awoke me from my reminiscence.  I'd burnt my damned chips! 

 © Annie Bell 2012

Birthday Cakes

Everyone knows a birthday isn't the same without a good birthday cake.  Over the course of this year, I have made four birthday cakes and I thought I'd write a little bit about them here

The first cake I made was in February.  I made a tiger cake for my Godson's second birthday.  

The cake itself was double chocolate chip and was covered with chocolate buttercream icing, prior to the sugarpaste being applied.  I was particularly proud of the fact that, with the exception of the tail, every part of the tiger's anatomy - even his ears - were made of cake rather than big chunks of icing.  He loved his 'rah rah' cake a lot!

 

The second cake I made was in March for my boyfriend's mum's birthday. 

This was a chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream again.  I decorated it with sugarpaste flowers, which I designed myself.  The whole cake was embellished with piped royal icing and sugar pearls.

The third cake was for my Mum's birthday in July. 

This cake was an awkward beast.  My mum wanted a chocolate walnut cake, my brother does not like nuts and my sister is allergic to chocolate.  As such, I had to find a compromise and this was it.  The bottom tier was a chocolate walnut sponge with chocolate buttercream.  The middle tier was a double chocolate chip sponge with chocolate buttercream and the top tier was a lemon sponge with lemon buttercream.  The variety went down well and I was pleased that the cake stayed in one piece!




The final cake was a joint effort.  In September, it was my Dad's 60th birthday and we were throwing a party for him.  We needed a cake that would feed 50+ people and this was it.  

My sister made the cake on the left - a cherry sponge with plain buttercream - and I made the one on the right - a chocolate and vanilla marble cake with chocolate buttercream.

The idea for the design was to create the number 60 in the form of a painted canvas for the number 6 and a pallette for the 0.  The numbers were then surrounded with sugar paste versions of various things my dad likes.  We designed the decoration together but made them seperately.  We were pleased with the results and managed to get more than 50 slices out of them!

I wonder what the next cake I bake will be...