Having Fun with Dough: Biscuit Creatures

Baking is all about fun, so let's have fun! Here are some little creatures I made using the biscuit dough I shared in my last post.

This isn't so much a recipe as it is just showing off my modelling skills: does it show that I studied ceramics in college? Seems my skills of working with clay are quite transferable to baking. However, it's important not to overwork the dough, and if it starts to get to soft and oily, pop it back in the fridge for 20 to 30 minutes. These biscuits have to be cold before they're cooked so they keep their shape.

I just started colouring some bits of lemon biscuit dough and started playing around. I found the best way of incorporating gel food colouring into the premade dough is using the French sablée technique, which is smearing the dough across the work surface and gathering it back up. It works the gluten in the flour the less than kneading it in. I also used cocoa powder mixed to a paste with boiling water to colour the brown dough.

I'll share with you how I made the hedgehogs, tortoises, and snakes.

To make the hedgehogs, I took a piece of brown dough, and a piece of white dough about a third of the size. I rolled them together to make a cone, and then stuck black sesame seeds in to make the face.

I allow the little hedgies to chill out in the fridge for half an hour before using the tip of a cocktail stick to rough up the brown dough to emulate spines. I then baked them for 12 minutes.













To make the snakes, I took two equal parts of coloured dough, in this case red and green, and rolled them each into a rope. I then rolled the ropes together and twisted them together to make stripes, keep one end thicker to make the head. I then pointed its nose and gave it two black sesame seed eyes.

Next time, I'll add a glacé cherry tongue.

I baked the snakes for a shorter time, about 10 minutes, because they're more fragile than the hedgehogs.










To make the tortoises, I rolled a piece of coloured dough into a ball and slightly flattened it to make a dome. I then took smaller pieces of dough, maybe a fifth of the size of the shell, and made the head and legs; the head is slightly larger than the legs.

Like the others, I used black sesame seeds for eyes, and after a half-hour rest in the fridge I used the back of a table knife to score shell markings into each tortoise's back.

I baked them for roughly 12 minutes.








I have a whole lot of ideas now for further biscuit creature ideas: maybe some bears, or little rabbits. Maybe I can hide pieces of chocolate inside, or marshmallow. Also, designs can be embellished and refined with icing or melted chocolate. I still like the traditional 2D cut out biscuits, of course, but the new 3D angle has a lot of interesting possibilities.

It's really opened up a whole lotta doors and a whole rake of new ideas for birthday gifts and party favours.....

Zesteratops: the Return of the Novelty Dinnersaurus!

Say hello to Zesteratops!

When I launched my blog back in 2013, I made a dinosaur shaped cake for my mother's birthday that year. It's my blog's most popular blog post, racking up over 1000 views so far!

As such, I thought an update of my technique was well overdue. I'm not really a novelty cake person, which you could probably tell from the fact that I've only ever done a 3D dinosaur and a 3D panda cake in the past. However, my attitude towards novelty cakes has been changing: recently my parents decided to foster an eleven year old boy, and having a child in the family again really changes to chemistry of family gatherings! (He actually named this cake: I was originally going to call it Lemonpleurodon)

Mum loves lemon or orange flavour cakes, and the previous dinnersaurus was orange flavoured so this time I went for lemon. I also decided to decorate with buttercream rather than fondant. I absolutely hate working with fondant, but I used it to design the details, like the back sails, tail spikes, eyes, and smiling face.

This project is very time consuming: from the moment I started mixing the cake, to the moment I put on the last tail spike, it took 6 hours. So keep this in mind when you go to make it!

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DIFFICULTY

Requires cake shaping and novelty decorating

TIME

About 6 hours

RECIPE RATING

Needs experience

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INGREDIMENTS

To make a dinosaur cake that will serve 16 to 20 people

One deep 9 inch (23 centimetre) round lemon flavoured cake

Some rolling fondant (sugarpaste) icing, to make decorative details

Food colouring

For the lemon curd

1 medium egg

4 teaspoons (20 millilitres) cornflour

2 large lemons

4 ounces (115 grammes) caster sugar

2 ounces (55 grammes) unsalted butter

Pinch or two of salt

For the icing

5 ounces (140 grammes) unsalted butter

5 ounces (140 grammes) Greek yoghurt

5 ounces (140 grammes) caster sugar

Zest of 1 lemon, see Method

10 ounces (280 grammes) white chocolate

Two pinches of salt

Yellow food colouring

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METHOD

• Before assembly, prepare the icing and the lemon curd. This recipe makes twice as much lemon curd as you need, so you can use the remainder for another project.

To make the lemon curd

• Zest the two lemons, and place the zest of one of the lemons into a measuring jug. Use the zest of the other lemon for the icing later.
• Into the jug, squeeze the two lemons and then top up with water to make 8 fluid ounces (240 millilitres) of liquid.
• In a small saucepan, blend the cornflour, sugar, and egg. Slowly mix in the diluted lemon juice until you have a fully combined mixture.
• Cook the mixture over medium high heat, mixing constantly, until it comes to the boil. Boil for a full minute or so until thickened and it loses some of its opacity.
• Sieve the mixture into a bowl, and then mix in the butter and a pinch of salt. To make the lemon curd taste richer, you might need to add an extra pinch of salt.
• Allow to cool to room temperature before covering with cling film, making sure the film touches the curd, and chilling in the fridge for about an hour.

While the curd is cooling, make the icing

• Follow the instructions in my Simnel cake recipe to make the icing, including the lemon zest in the cooked yoghurt and sugar mixture and omitting the lemon juice. Allow to cool as instructed.
• Tint the icing a pale yellow colour to represent the lemon flavour. Or, you can make it any summery colour you like.

Assembly

• Take the cake, and cut it in half horizontally. Don't cut off the dome: you'll need that to help the shape of the dinosaur.
• Cut each half in half vertically. Now you will have 4 semicircles: two flat ones, and two with domes.
• Take the two domed semicircles and sandwich a flat semicircle between them. Use lemon curd to secure the shapes together.

• Take the remaining flat semicircle and cut it into thirds. You will have two rounded shapes, and one long, rectangular shape. The rectangular shape will be used later for the tail.
• Take the two rounded pieces and sandwich them together with the lemon curd to make the head.

• You now have a body piece, a head piece, and a tail piece. Secure all the elements together as shown using some icing, and then trim the cake to make it more dinosaur shaped.
• After all the cutting and trimming, you'll have roughly 4 ounces (115 grammes) of cake trimmings. Use these and some more lemon curd to make some cake truffle mixture, and use this to make some legs. If you don't have enough cake crumbs to make all four legs, just make two legs and form the remaining legs out of fondant.

• Fix the legs to the body with icing, cover the entire cake in a crumb coat, and then chill in the fridge for about 20 minutes before decorating however you like! I used a petal piping technique to make scales, but you could use fondant if you like.

THIS TIME IN 2017: American Style: Chocolate Fudge Tart
THIS TIME IN 2016: Chocolate Biscuit Cake, a.k.a: Rocky Road
THIS TIME IN 2015: Zingy Lemon Gâteau (Wheat Free)
THIS TIME IN 2013: Experiment: Homemade Sprinkles
There was no blog on this day in 2014.

3D Teddy Bear Cake! Part III: Decoration

And now for the final home stretch! If you've completed parts one and two, you're ready for part three. By the end of this step, your cake should look something like this:

Now, I've decorated my teddy bear cake to look like a panda, but you could do whatever kind of bear you like. You could make up some more chocolate icing and make him a simple teddy bear, or you could go completely mental with decorations. I've kept it nice and simple.

You will need:

• 10 ounces (300 grammes) white buttercream icing
• 10 ounces (300 grammes) chocolate buttercream icing, dyed black
• About 2 ounces (55 grammes) fondant icing
• Black and green food colouring
• A wafer stick
• A grass piping nozzle, or a clean toothbrush
• Any other decorations you'd like

What to do with them:

Spread or pipe the white and black icing onto the bear to mimic the colouring of a panda. I spread mine on then textured it with a toothbrush once it had set a little, but you can also use a grass nozzle to pipe on individual tufts of fur. That takes far too long for me, and gives me a cramp in my hand, so I use go low-tech.

If you're going the spreading and texturing route, use a new clean toothbrush with soft bristles. Also, it really helps if you have an offset palette knife to get into all the corners.

Dye a small amount of fondant green to make some leaves, and then dye a larger amount black to make his eye patches (rolled and cut out), nose (moulded with my fingertips) and mouth (made out of a thin fondant rope). Place the eye patches, nose, and mouth on the icing while it's still a little wet, then add in the eyes, which are made out of small discs of white and black fondant.

Place the wafer stick in place, and then decorate it with the leaves. If you like, you could make fondant bows, or little bugs or things to add extra interest. If you want to skip on the fondant altogether, you can just pipe on the appropriately coloured buttercream to make the facial features and leaves.

As you can see from the three parts of this tutorial, this is a long-winded and ambitious project. The results are cool, however I'll be returning to my traditional gateaux after this, and probably won't do another novelty cake for a while....

3D Teddy Bear Cake! Part II: Assembly

Following on from part one, where you made the cakes and the icing, it's time to move onto part two here we assemble the cakes, so you have something that looks like this by the end!

So, if you completed part one fully, you should now have roughly a butt-tonne of icing, two 7 inch (16 centimetre) bowl shaped cakes, one 4 inch (10 centimetre) tall round cake, and one 8 inch (20 centimetre) sandwich cake. With that, let's begin!

I thought instead of taking photos of the whole process, which sometimes can be hard to understand, I would draw a series of brightly colour coordinated diagrams in Photoshop, which took me two whole hours. To see each picture expanded, click on it.

Here are the diagrams for the Head and Body. Please click 

on the pictures to expand them.

Here is the diagram for the overall assembly.

Please click on the picture to expand it.

Here is how to assemble the overall teddy cake. Please

click on the picture to expand.

IMPORTANT
If making this cake for children, do not use cocktail sticks! Use pieces of dry spaghetti to fix the cake together. I usually do that anyway, regardless of the age group, because if someone accidentally eats one it won't do them much harm.

Now we've assembled the cake, it's time to decorate! Click here for Part III.

3D Teddy Bear Cake! Part I: Designing, and Baking the Cakes

For the first time since 2013, I had made a novelty 3D shaped cake! It's been a whole four years, but I present to you Novelty Cake № 2: Panda Bear!

Being a bitter cynic, I generally don't like novelty cakes: I feel like they're cheap tricks in comparison to a perfectly crafted, technically challenging traditional gâteau. However, that doesn't mean that others don't like them, or appreciate them, or enjoy receiving them as gifts.

For the past few years, I've been making the same kinds of cakes for my sister and this year I was motivated to do something completely different for her, and also to do another novelty cake for all my lovely readers! (Seeing as the Dinnersaurus is the most read post on my blog.)

This one was a serious challenge, and took pretty much two days to make it from scratch from cake mixture to finished cake model. And in this two part post, I'll explain the process from start to finish how I did it!

Research

Once I decided to do the 3D cake, I researched how people had already made it. So, I looked at many videos online, from this sped up version using multiple 6 inch (16 centimetre) cakes which are then trimmed and shaped, Ann Reardon's version using different shapes of cake on How To Cook That, and I even watched a German video from Nicoles Zuckerwerk. 

Most 3D teddy recipes use cake truffles to make the arms, legs, ears, and tail, but I didn't want to do that because I thought it would be too sickly. I decided that I would make as many aspects of the bear out of cake, and only resort to fondant if absolutely necessary.

I also researched what teddy bears look like when sitting down by turning to my very helpful model: Val. He was bought for me by my companion for Valentine's Day, and he's a lovely. My companion helped me visualise some aspects of the bear model, but mostly it's pretty straightforward.

Tin Shapes and Sizes

Instead of making a load of layers of round cake and cutting to size, thus wasting a lot of cake, I thought about how I could make cakes that are as close to the actual bear component shapes as possible. I originally contemplated getting a terracotta pot that would make a conical cake, but thought against it once I realised how much preparation a terracotta pot needs to be used for baking.

I decided to use traditional round cakes, and cakes cooked in a small Pyrex baking dish. I used one tall 4 inch (10 centimetre)  round tin, a 7x2 inch (16x5 centimetre) Pyrex pudding dish, and an 8 inch (20 centimetre) round sandwich tin.

Baking the Cakes
The issue with novelty cakes is that they need a good, firm, dry cake that's easily cut and moulded. This means the cake keeps its shape, but it's not—in my opinion—the nicest cake to eat. If you like, throughout assembly you can sprinkle the cakes with a nice simple syrup to keep them moist.

Round 1
In round one, I made a cake mixture by creaming together 4 ounces (115 grammes) soft butter and 3 ounces (85 grammes) caster sugar, until light and fluffy. In a small cup, I beat 4 egg yolks with 2 fluid ounces (60 millilitres) room temperature milk, and gradually beat it into the butter mixture in 4 increments, beating very well after each addition. Onto a sheet of baking paper, I sifted 7½ (210 grammes) ounces of white spelt flour, ½ ounce (15 grammes) of cocoa powder, and 2 teaspoons (10 millilitres) of baking powder. In a separate bowl, I whipped the 4 egg whites with another 3 ounces (85 grammes) of caster sugar until it reached stiff peaks. I added half of this to the butter mixture, along with half of the dry ingredients. I mixed this through halfway, then added the remaining half of the whites and dry ingredients. I then finally folded it through carefully but thoroughly until there were no streaks of egg white or flour left.

I divided this mixture between the 4 inch (10 centimetre) tin, and the 7 inch (16 centimetre) dish, making sure to fill each one no more than three-quarters full; the tin will need less mixture than the dish. I baked them in an oven preheated to 180°C (350°F, Gas Mk.3) for 25 to 30 minutes-ish, or until a skewer inserted into the centre of each cake came out clean. I took the smaller cake out about 2 or 3 minutes earlier than the larger one.

Round 2
Once the cakes were cooked, I made the same amount of mixture again, but with half the amount of baking powder. I needed the first lot to have big domes, because they come in handy later. I divided the mixture once again, but this time equally between the Pyrex dish and the sandwich tin.

I then allowed all the cakes to cool completely before assembly.

Making the Icing
Similarly with the icing, you need a good thick, rich icing that sets firm. This helps you with any trimming you might need to do, and helps keep the overall shape in place.

To make the icing, I melted 1 pound (445 grammes) of plain chocolate, half a pound (225 grammes) of unsalted butter, and 4 fluid ounces (120 millilitres) of whole milk together. I allowed them to set to room temperature (about an hour), then beat in 1 pound (445 grammes) of icing sugar to make a rich, thick, decadent chocolate icing. If you find the icing begins to set in the bowl while you're working on the cake, just give it the odd whisk every now and again.

Now we've made the cakes and the icing, it's time to assemble! Click here to see Part II of this tutorial, which includes fully colour coordinated diagrams!