Sunday 31 January 2016

The twins' birthday cakes - recipes by Bex

I had a whole day of baking before the twins' birthday as I wanted to make their cakes myself and I wanted them to have one each.  And then I decided there should also be a third cake for a number one.  And then I thought I may as well make a few cupcakes.  I really don't know when to stop!  Anyway, I found a few recipes I liked the sound of and pinned them.  I planned to try them all out before the big day but only managed one practice lemon cake and ended up ruling that one out as it was nice but quite heavy and stodgy and one chocolate cake for Halloween which was a bit dry so I changed the method slightly and baked it for less time.  I wanted nice, light, moist, delicious cakes.  I think I delivered.  I liked them all anyway (although the chocolate one was still a little drier than I'd hoped).

Here are the recipes I used, in case you fancy trying any of them:

I made these cupcakes for their actual birthday so they'd each have a birthday cake on the day.  It was their first ever taste of cake so I made simple vanilla cupcakes using this cupcake recipe from the BBC.



It worked so well and the cakes were delicious (none survived until the party on Saturday!) so I modified it to make the third sponge cake and luckily it came out just as nicely.  I also made another batch of cupcakes and a few teenie tiny cakes for babies.

For Kalyan's cake I used this chocolate cake recipe by Mary Berry and although I put the ganache in the middle, I used the simple buttercream icing from the cupcakes above to ice all of my cakes.

Priya's lemon cake was absolutely delicious and again I used the same simple icing.  I'll definitely be making this one again!

I spent a long time practising smoothing buttercream icing and spent ages trying to get them as smooth as possible.  I was pretty chuffed with the finished result, although they weren't perfect.


I enjoyed spending a bit of time painting the white initial cake toppers.  In retrospect, I wish I'd decorated the number 1 on the middle as well as you can't see it against the white wall!  I left that one white as I used my rainbow sprinkles on the top of that cake.  I also used the mini bunting I made for the rainbow cake I made for the twins' naming ceremony in May.



I always planned to hang them on the twins' bedroom door with an ampersand after they were used on the cakes.



I had even more fun painting the ampersand post party as I had more time to concentrate on it and mixed more colours to get a good rainbow fade.  I used those colours to improve the P and K as well as neatening the patterns as I'd finished them at about 1am the night before the party in a bit of a hurry!  I'd messed up the chevrons a bit but managed to sort them out.  The ampersand is definitely my favourite though.



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