Cake of the Month – February 2015

Leave a comment Mar 11, 2015 freecakesforkidshackney

When we told baker Lisa that we’d picked her leopard print cake to be our Cake of the Month for February she said it was, and we quote, “the highlight of her year”! It is only March, but we’ll take that!

PS: We reckon the world would be a better place with a bit more leopard print in it.

Name of baker: Lisa Stewart
Name of cake: Luscious leopard print cake

Ingredients:
Easy chocolate cake recipe from BBC Good Food
Butter icing
Jam
Ready to roll icing
Gel food colouring

Method:
I started by making two large chocolate bases, then flattened them off and stacked with some butter icing and jam in between. I then added a layer of butter icing around the cakes before covering with the ready to roll icing.

To get the animal print effect I used a deep purple and black gel colouring, adding uneven blotches of the deep purple all over the cake and then drawing black outlines around these. There are loads of amazing tutorials on YouTube if you want to try it yourself!

To complete the cake, I made a little bow and some numbers out of ready to roll icing.

About the baker:
I recently got quite in to baking after I started making cakes for friends’ birthdays. One of my friends then sent me a link to Free Cakes for Kids and I thought it was such a great idea – I’d get to perfect my cake decorating skills whilst doing something for people in my local community.

Not only is it great fun throwing glitter and sparkles on a cake but it’s also a lovely feeling knowing that your cake could help to make someone’s day special. Everyone deserves to be made a fuss of on their birthday and I like to think my cakes help with that!

Cake of the Month – January 2015

Leave a comment Mar 11, 2015 freecakesforkidshackney

Finally, we’re nearly catching up with our Cake of the Months – we’re into 2015 now at least! This cake was new baker Sophie’s first bake for us. We decided that we’d let her stay 😉

If you’ve ever wondered how to make one of *those* Barbie cakes then wonder no more…

Name of baker: Sophie Simpson
Name of cake: Princess Barbie

Ingredients:
Vanilla sponge cake, buttercream icing, raspberry jam.

Method:
Wrap Barbie in clingfilm (including her hair) in order to protect her from the icing. Stack 3/4 sponges with buttercream and jam until the height reaches Barbie’s torso. Cut a circular hole in the centre for Barbie and shave the top and sides into a bell shape.

Decorate as desired by piping/spreading buttercream dyed pink with food colouring around the cake and finishing with ribbons/edible decorations.

About the baker:
With a busy job, I rarely get a chance to cook dinner, let alone bake, but it’s something I really enjoy therefore I thought FCFK Hackney would provide a great opportunity to do some baking as well as contributing to a wonderful cause.

Cake of the Month – December 2014

Leave a comment Mar 11, 2015 freecakesforkidshackney

Talking of ever so cute cakes … awww, this snowman is just the most adorable thing. And the best thing about volunteering for us for baker Anna? She gets to lick the bowl! Yum yum!

Name of baker: Anna Greenwood
Name of cake: Snowman

Ingredients:
For the cake-
Five eggs; then same weight as eggs of self-raising flour, sugar and butter. One or two teaspoons of vanilla extract.
For the buttercream–
250g butter, 500g icing sugar, one teaspoon of vanilla extract
Decorations–
Coloured fondant icing, sweets, carrots, whatever works…

Method:
Heat oven to 180 / 160 if fan. Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one by one, mixing thoroughly as each is added. Add vanilla extract. Sieve and fold flour into the mixture carefully without knocking the air out or over mixing. Divide between two tins and bake for 30 minutes until springy, but keep an eye on them after 25 minutes. Allow to cool and make buttercream by mixing the ingredients together.

When cake is cool, cut one cake into a smaller round for the head (unless you’ve baked in two different sized tins), then cut an inch of cake off each round so one can sit on the other. Lather it in buttercream, inside and out if you like. Smooth the outside with a scraper and get it as neat as you can. Give your snowman a face with sweets, liquorice or coloured icing for eyes, nose and mouth. Make a scarf by rolling out two strips of coloured icing, cutting into one end for the authentic frayed scarf look. Make a hat or anything else you fancy. Doesn’t he look nice? Now EAT HIM.

About the baker:
I’m a DJ and work from home so it’s easy for me to whip up a cake during the day. Plus I get to lick the bowl after and everyone knows cake mix is the best bit of this whole baking process. FCFK Hackney is such a great charity and idea and it’s so nice to be part of it and make something fun to be enjoyed at a celebration. My decorating may not be Great British Bake Off worthy, but the cakes always taste good!

Cake of the Month – November 2014

Leave a comment Mar 11, 2015 freecakesforkidshackney

November’s Cake of the Month is up next – a dinosaur in cake form that was so cute it made us fall a little bit in love with it. If we could have taken it home to keep as a pet then we would have!

Name of baker: Esther Metcalf
Name of cake: Dinosaur cake

Ingredients:
Cake:
Butter, sugar, self-raising flour, baking powder, cocoa powder
Icing 1 (main cake):
Butter, icing sugar, cocoa powder
Icing 2 (under the dinosaur cake):
Butter, icing sugar, vanilla seeds

Method:
Standard Victoria sandwich cake method for the cake – I made three circular cakes. Two were used sandwiched together for the base cake which was then covered in dark green fondant and the third cake was used to form the body of the dinosaur.

I made some off cuts for the tail and head and then sandwiched together the remaining halves of the circle to form his arching body.

A base layer of vanilla butter cream made a smooth base to cover over with orange fondant (from my favourite shop, Party Party in Dalston) for the dinosaur’s body, and I added cut out triangles fixed with dabs of water for his spikes and yellow dots stuck on this way too. The best bit was adding his googly eyes and teeth!

A sneaky flourish of green buttercream icing helped cover some cracks in the green fondant.

About the baker:
My day job as an architect doesn’t always mean I get to be as creative as I would like, drawing on the computer all day. So baking is a way for almost instant creative gratification. FCFK Hackney seemed an obvious match. I love making cakes, especially fun ones for kids and FCFK Hackney need volunteers to make them.

Cake of the Month – October 2014

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Um, yeah, so it’s March 2015 and we’re posting October 2014’s Cake of the Month. We’ve reached new levels of lateness, but hello! Baker Beth only went and made TWO amazing cakes for one year-old and three year-old sisters. The older sister had been in and out of hospital and the family were planning a special celebration for when she came home. Beth could have *just* made a pair of vicky sponges, but she didn’t. She went to town and has some great icing tips to share below. Read on…

Name of baker: Beth
Name of cakes: Makka Pakka garden cake and Mickey Mouse ball pool cake
Ingredients:
Chocolate sponge with chocolate icing x 2
Fondant icing
Food colouring (I find the gel ones best as they give such a bright colour)
Various icing tools – I usually use whatever I can find around the house such as different sized knives, chopsticks, bottle tops etc
Lots and lots and lots of Smarties!

Method:
First I covered each sponge with chocolate frosting followed by a sheet of fondant icing. For the Makka Pakka cake, I coloured the fondant blue, and for the Mickey cake, bright pink. A tip I was given for colouring large amounts of icing like this is to colour a small ball of icing first, making sure its colour is brighter than you want the final colour to be, then knead this small ball into the rest of the icing. I love this way, as it is much quicker and the end product ends up much less streaky.

After this, I used more icing and even more colours to decorate the two cakes! I used leaf cutters and star cutters to decorate the Makka Pakka cake to look like a garden and the sky, before adding some clouds and a fondant Makka Pakka to the top of the cake.

For the Mickey cake, I recruited a good friend of mine who usually comes to the rescue when my baking doesn’t go to plan, to help me make a Mickey from fondant icing – which turned out to be much harder than we first thought! Once we conquered this, I rolled out a long thick tube of purple icing, lined the cake with it, placed Mickey in the middle and then poured Smarties around him to make the cake look like a big ball pool.

And that’s it! Making two cakes in one evening was definitely a challenge, but once I heard that the two girls were sisters, I was very glad to do it.

About the baker:
Hi, I’m Beth. I’ve been baking for FCFK Hackney for about a year now, and began after I graduated from university. It has been a bit of a crazy year, but I really enjoy taking the time to bake, and love to challenge myself with new cake designs. I definitely wouldn’t have the opportunity to make cakes like this without FCFK Hackney, so I am grateful for the opportunity!

Where the hell have we been?!

Leave a comment Mar 11, 2015 freecakesforkidshackney

We’re sorry, we know you’ve no doubt been checking our website on an almost daily basis wondering when the bloody hell we were going to get on and post something else. We haven’t just been sitting around watching daytime telly, we can assure you of that; we’ve been busy, as in mega, mega busy!

If you’re one of our likers on good ol’ Facebook, or if you follow us on twitter then you’ll have some idea of what we’ve been up to these past months, from fundraising to celebrating our bakers with a big party, not to mention keeping the good ship FCFK Hackney ticking over as we bake more cakes than ever (336 was our total at the end of February). We’ll be writing a bit more about all that soon, but, right now, we wanted to chat money!

A little while ago now we put in for a BBC Children in Need grant and completed a rather rigorous application process. We knew that the competition for the money would be immense so, whilst we had our fingers permanently crossed, we’d told ourselves not to be too disappointed if we didn’t get the funding. But guess what? We only went and got. the. funding! Yes, yes we did!

While this was going on, we also applied for a Skipton Building Society ‘Grassroots Giving’ grant. You may remember this because it was down to the public vote who got the money and we spent a considerable amount of time badgering you lovely lot to vote for us. Well, ~~our badgering~~ your voting paid off and we got the grant. Whoop! (Witness a happy TEAM FCFK Hackney in the photo on the right in receipt of our grant from Skipton.)

Meanwhile, some rather generous companies out there – the awesome Adams Catering Hire and Chegworth Valley Juices, we’re looking at you – decided that Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas unless they gave us some cash. So they did. And we were, and still are, massively grateful. Unlike the grants, this ‘unattached’ money means that we can pay for some of the more mundane costs associated with the running of FCFK Hackney, like DBS checks and insurance, and it takes the pressure off us having to fundraise like crazy when we have other things on our plate, like…

…family baking workshops. Yep, that’s what the applications for the Children in Need and Skipton grants were all about. We were so encouraged by the two baking workshops that we held previously – and the response we got from the children and their parents/carers who then went on to bake at home as a family using our equipment and basic recipe – that we really wanted to expand our service to offer more of the same. The grants will enable us to do just that and we’ve already done our training session (thanks to Long White Cloud on Hackney Road for hosting us and our rather large collection of blue mixing bowls) and have a whole series of baking workshops lined up, starting at the end of this month (eeek, better get our pinnies ironed!). We can’t wait to get started properly and are particularly excited to be involving some older young people (if that makes sense) from Think Forward to help deliver our workshops.

Ok, we reckon we’ve waffled on enough now, so we’ll leave you with some shots of the muffins and the microwave mug cakes, for families without ovens, that we’ve been trialing ahead of the workshops. And stay tuned because we’ve got a whole backlog of Cake of the Months to post and we’d love it if each baker gets their moment to shine.