Stoma Cakes and WOYWW

This evening I suddenly remembered it was Wednesday and time for WOYWW! Better late than never… That seems to be my theme recently.

Here’s my desk as it is today.

I’ve been working on some Zentangle tracings of photos I took in Mamhead Woods when we went with friends last month. I am making a small album (2 copies, one for me and one for them) and am going to overlay some of them with tracings done on parchment paper. See here for more details of this.

I haven’t done any more since that post because I’ve been pretty busy with other things.

On Saturday we went to Montacute in Somerset, and had a lovely day out.

This coming Saturday, my hubby is very kindly driving me to Somerset again, for an Ileostomy Association meeting – I don’t usually ask him to take me to meetings as far afield as this, but it’s the 60th anniversary and I thought it would be good to go to that one – the Devon and Somerset branch covers quite a large geographical area. As well as the usual things (lunch, the committee stuff, reps from supply companies showing their products, a speaker, a supplies exchange table and a raffle), because it’s a special meeting, they’ve decided to hold a cake baking competition. With my love of baking I couldn’t pass up this opportunity. Unfortunately Mary Berry wasn’t available to judge the cakes… I know that my baking isn’t up to winning standard, and I expect there will be some beautifully iced offerings and this is something I can’t manage to do, but nothing daunted, I thought I’d enter anyway because it’s fun! To make it more fun, I decided to make some stoma cakes and see if anyone recognises what they are!! I might get the booby prize for giving people a good laugh, anyway!

So yesterday I rolled up my sleeves and got baking. I finished the icing this morning.

Here are the stoma cakes.

Note the chocolate chip in the centre of each one or a bit of added realism!!!

This time I decided to make marble cake, so I made up two mixtures, one plain and one chocolate, and mixed them together without stirring too much. The plain mixture had a generous dose of vanilla extract and the chocolate mixture was flavoured with cocoa powder, and the resulting cake has a delicate chocolate flavour, as well as looking quite interesting! I used a basic Madeira cake recipe which is nice and moist.

While making them, I had a complete mental aberration – I was putting alternate spoonfuls of the two mixtures into the cup cake cases and thought the plain mix seemed a bit runny, and suddenly realised I hadn’t put the flour in! Duh… A narrowly averted disaster! I scooped out as much as I could and added the flour, but they were a bit of a mess! I had originally decided to make 12 stoma cakes, and then use the rest of the mixture to make a larger square cake to cut into portions, but to be sure I got a decent enough batch to take on Saturday, I made a second lot, and kept the others for home consumption. There was enough mixture left for a half-sized square cake which yielded a few portions.

I had made enough of the pale pink icing for the stoma cakes, but made too much of the red icing, so I used this up on the other cakes, just swirling it on with the piping bag, and added some candy sprinkles for decoration.

Here are the resulting cakes.

I wouldn’t normally use such lurid red icing on my cakes!!

I made them in good time for Saturday, as the buttercream stomas are quite thick, and will take a few days to firm up and be safe for transporting to Somerset. I’ll let you know how I get on in the competition, and whether they go down all right, and whether anyone recognises what they are!!

I also made an almond and cherry cake from my mum’s old recipe. She used to make it in a round tin and put whole almonds on top, but I used my usual baking frame and cut it into portions. To make the cutting easier, I used flaked almonds rather than whole ones.

This is a lovely moist cake. I add more almond essence than the recipe says, as I like a good robust flavour!

Last time I baked, I made some coffee drizzle cake as an experiment. I love lemon drizzle cake and wondered if it would work as well with coffee – the result was a delicious moist and flavoursome cake, but the top did not end up nice and crunchy like on the lemon version. I forgot to photograph these. Most of them are now in the freezer.

In between all this activity I’ve been pretty exhausted and resting a good deal of the time. I’ve done a few more Zentangle samples for my album and a lot of preparation for my Bible study group which is going very well.

Have a great week, everybody.