The last three days have been completely dominated by the making of two birthday cakes. One for today, the other for tomorrow. As I said previously, it’s been months since I last baked anything serious. I must say it was fun getting back into it & boy did I get given a request to get back in there with a bang………

It started off ok, the chosen recipe was the Carnation banoffee caramel cake https://www.carnation.co.uk/recipes/banoffee-layer-cake

To be made nut free, gluten free & as little dairy used as possible. Not too bad, then came the killer blow, can you make it into a Rubik cube?…………Well, never one to say no to a challenge, I agreed, but I was sceptical as to whether I would be able to produce anything worthwhile. Especially after I looked at some of the cakes online. The challenge had been accepted though & so began 3 days of frantic baking & experimenting.

The other cake I made was relatively easy by comparison, it was my chocolate orange cake. It is very straightforward, just needs time to incorporate all the elements.

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The original Carnation recipe used whipping cream & was designed to be a make & eat cake. I needed something firmer to layer the cake & with less dairy. I settled on a butter cream, made from free from spread & a salted Caramel frosting made by Morrisons. The cakes themselves I made with gluten free flour.

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Everything combined to make a very rich, very tasty, but completely unworkable cake. On the advice of a friend I froze it for an hour, then left it in the fridge overnight. That made cutting it into shape easy.

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Then began the headache of how to stick the coloured squares of icing on to the cake. The chocolate orange cake is flooded with chocolate ganache, I decided I’d do the same with this one, using it as the glue to stick the panes of squares on, but then I hit another big problem. The coloured icing I’d bought as a cheat, stated it may contain nuts! I was potentially going to have to make & colour the sugar paste myself. Luckily that turned out not to be the case & so the assembly job commenced.

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As you can see it worked. It still looked like this the next morning, much to my relief. Whilst far from perfect, it does look like a Rubik cube & the birthday boy is chuffed to pieces with it & for me, that’s all that matters. It makes all the work worth it.

Love M. XXX