“Cakeophilia” (Raspberry Crush) Cake
Cake has always been an integral part of my life.
My mother is a great cook with a zillion cookbooks she’s never read and a handwritten book from her younger years filled with illegible spidery writing devolving the secrets of her mother and grandmother. When I was young she baked – cherry cake for my brother, chocolate marshmallow slice for trips away, ginger crunch and Eccles cakes for my dad to take on his trout fishing or duck shooting trips, cheese straws, Neapolitan coloured layer cake for my birthdays, hokey-pokey biscuits… the list goes on…
My best friend’s mother baked every week and put the results directly into the freezer, still on the baking trays. Rachel and I ate a lot of frozen cake… Caramel slice, queen cakes, Louise cake…
And I started baking pretty young. I recall the time when licking the bowl was my sum contribution, the first time I tried to decorate a finished cake with pink and white buttercream and a piping bag with a star nozzle… It took hours, or so it seemed… I was frustrated because buttercream isn’t really white – butter is yellow of course… I hated rough iced cakes and viewed this decoration technique as a form of cheating…. I discovered royal icing – white as snow but with not particularly pleasant eating qualities – I used it anyway… I went through a phase where I though icing was evil and never bothered icing anything…. But slowly, icing came back to me, sugar paste with its impossibly perfect finish found its way into my heart… I experimented with new frosting, marzipan, fondant and fancy patisserie buttercreams…
And now for me cake is here to stay. I bake when I’m happy, sad, exhausted, energetic… I bake in my PJs…
Cupcakes, croqembouche, wedding cakes, macarons… Let me share my cakeophilia with you….
ChicCakeChick (Kadri)
xxx
Your cakes are the best !!! Will this be a NEW career for you ? If you make something “horsey” ….. You get heaps of orders !!
I absolutely need to make a horse cake – maybe for your birthday!