Death by Chocolate?

So. Much. Chocolate.

This one was for my Grandad's 70th Birthday party

This cake is amazingly good. I have put in the recipe because everyone should eat this cake!!
Black Bottom Cake
Ingredients

• 225g cream cheese
• 1 egg
• 1 1/3 cups sugar
• pinch of salt
• 175g dark chocolate chips
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 100g butter, melted
• 1 cup water
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 1 tbsp vinegar

Preheat oven to 190 degrees Celcius
Lightly grease 20cm tin
Beat together cream cheese, egg, 1/2 cup of the sugar and the pinch of salt.
Stir in choc chips.
In another bowl sift flour, soda, cocoa and salt then add the remaining sugar, melted butter, water, vanilla extract and vinegar.
Pour flour and cocoa mixture into tin then cream cheese mixture on top.
Bake for 45 mins
Allow to cool before removing from tin.
Ice with chocolate ganache.

The chocolate decorations on top was one of the most fun things I've done with chocolate. First to get the heart shape I folded a piece of paper in half and drew half of a heart and cut it out so when I unfolded it the heart was symmetrical. A trick I learnt in Primary school!!! Then I melted the chocolate and spread it out quite thick (maybe 5mm) on some baking paper. Then waited until it was mostly dry (the chocolate goes shiny and glossy) and lay the heat cutout on top and cut around with a knife. Use a small heart cutter and cut into the shape some around the top left and then I put it in the fridge to set.

The small hearts are slightly thicker. But follow the same process and use the small heart cutter. When they are set use some melted chocolate to attached thick wire to the back. Melt some white chocolate and flick it over the big heart however you wish.

We kept everything refrigerated right up until the last minute because I was paranoid it was going to melt and the heart was going to break. As you can kind of see in the photo below we used a piping nozzle to get the right lean on the heart and then pushed the wired hearts through the hole.

And voila.

Themed Birthday Cakes

As me and my friends started our cake decorating adventure we practiced on our friends and families for their birthdays. The following are a few of these from last year. 

 The car we made we was for Jodi's dad. He's a car fiend. It was interesting cutting the cake into the shape of the car. We made the wheels and headlights out of candy, and the icing was fondant.

This one was for Jodi's brother's girlfriend. She was having a cocktail party and wanted a cocktail type cake and short of making a 3D cocktail glass cake this was the best we could come up with. It was pretty easy to do and was fun doing the piping around the outside. I definitely want to practice more doing piping.

As you can probably tell this was for a friends 30th. It's pretty self explanatory what he was in to. Haha. We had lots of fun making the sports gear and the cars. Also all made out of fondant.

Cakes!!!

So I like to decorate cakes. I like to decorate them more than I like to bake them, but that's mostly because I'm always scared I'm going to stuff the cake up and it will taste horrible.
The first cake that I made, with a lot of help from my step-sister was a joint birthday cake for my two friends who I usually decoarte cakes with.
Since it was for both of them it was going to be too hard to do a themed cake so I decided something pretty would be easier. So I do what anyone does when they have no ideas, I go onto google. and trawl through a whole heap of photos. It's amazing the cakes that people have done. So I found a few and after talking with my step-sister, Toni, I decided on this one. Bright coloured fondant with stripes and dots and flowers with vines coming out of the flowers. It took all week as we were making it up as we went along but I'm quite proud of the result. I enjoyed doing it. This was the beginning for me.

The cake is just a basic chocolate cake. Was a hit, and my friends loved it

So much effort for 30seconds for everyone to sing Happy Birthday and then for Jodi and Neisha to blow out the candles and then it was complately decimated.... Sigh....