Saturday 20 October - Mums Birthday Cake and Meal

Saturday was Mums 80th Birthday, and the family clubbed together to buy a construction to be built in the garden, and the plants to grow up this - so the challenge initially was to recreate this in the form of a cake.

We began with our old trusty fruit cake recipe from Good Housekeeping - the only change I make to it is to replace the peel with more raisins as I can't bear candied peel.

This was covered in marzipan after a couple of weeks being fed with rum and brandy, and then a final layer of green icing was added to represent the lawn.

We tend to work as a team on cakes, as Bob is artistic, and I am most certainly not. We decided to do the trellis as a topper to add to the cake, so it would be easier to transport on the day - so the base was made of balsa wood covered in fondant. The trellis was fashioned from coffee stirrers and matches, held together with wire and glue and using a teeny tiny drill.

I then had great fun making all sorts of colours of icing in the Kenwood with the dough hook, and we started making very basic flowers and leaves using some cutters.

We attached these using wire, and edible glue, and added some fantastic little gardening tools I had found on the internet to finish off the whole garden effect.

Overall, quite pleased with this one, as it looked how we imagined it was going to when we started out (and apparantly the cake tasted ok too!)

 We served this cake in the afternoon, and then in the evening served a three course meal - this was adapted to make it low fat, but hopefully so people not on diets weren't aware of this.

First course was Mums famous 1970s Crab Mousse, but instead of using mayonnaise and cream, we made it with less than 3% fat mayonnaise and low fat yoghurt. This was made in individual moulds to make it look posher, and served with devilled tomato sauce.

 Second course was a Pork Paprikas - basically pork Goulash made with hot, sweet and smoked paprikas, tinned tomatoes and finished with low fat soured cream. This was served with Spatzle noodles and green beans.

The final course was as requested by Mum - she wanted a tower of profiteroles. This was one course I didn't really get to try, although I had one to test them.
This was a sort of Profiterole Belle Helene - as the filling was pastry cream mixed with finely chopped pears, and a rich chocolate sauce made of cream, and a mixture of plain and milk chocolate poured over the top.

 

Happy Birthday Mum!!!