Wow, have I really written 360 blog posts? That's a lot! And to celebrate, I'm sharing the cake I made for my Mum's birthday! Seems quite ordinary, but I'll explain.
When you’ve made as many cakes as I have, sometimes you hit a creative drought. 2017 was an extremely prolific year for my blog, and I think since then my output has been a little stunted by life stresses and pressures: work, wedding planning, martial arts exams, learning how to drive, etc. The last two years has been a manic time in my life, all in good ways for a change!
Because so much happened over such a short time, I’ve been playing catch up with myself pretty much all throughout. My blog, as such, went on the back burner.
But now, as school is slackening off in preparation for summer (the Irish summer holidays are very long, and normally start in the last week of May right up until the last week of August, except for those doing state exams) and I’ll soon be having about three months’ paid holidays and loads of free time, baking will be back on the menu big style.
But anyway, back to what I was saying about creative drought.
When a family birthday comes around, sometimes I feel a little uninspired: my brother Paddy loves the same chocolate cake every year, my brother Andrew loves the same coffee cake every year, my Mum loves the same lemon cake every year, my Dad loves either a coffee cake or some kind of Bakewell thing every year, I love the same strawberry and cream cake every year.... the only person who likes to try something different every year is my sister Nix, because she loves having a big fuss made over her for her birthday (and why not?)
So, May rolled around this year and again it’s time to make a lemon cake for Mum’s birthday. It’s always yellow, always zingy lemon, and always has lemon curd in it. However, this year I decided to use a piping technique that I’ve seen on Pinterest and Instagram so many times but never got around to doing myself.
Normally, when you do a swirled icing with many colours, one folds the piping bag open over their hand and scrapes the different colour icings along the inside, avoiding contact with each other, so that when you twist and pipe they come together out through the nozzle. However, I’ve found sometimes the colours mix as you pipe, so the distinction between them completely disappears. You can also pop piping bags in piping bags, which is a little wasteful for me.
I’ve seen people getting around this problem online by using clingfilm (which, albeit wasteful, is nowhere near as wasteful as using loads of piping bags) to keep the colours separate: they spoon the icing into a sheet of film, fold it over to enclose the colour, then add another colour alongside it, then wrap it again, and so on. What you end up with is like a clingfilm and icing Swiss roll of many colours.
And this worked perfectly! I went with a classic complementary scheme (yellow and purple) and it worked wonders: the white, yellow, and purple stayed separate all throughout piping without mixing. I recommend this method, as long as you don’t mind using cling film.
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