New Year's Eve cake

Imagine spending a whole year doing exactly what you want to do - every day. Imagine waking up every morning, thinking that this day is going to be close to perfection, because you get to be present in the moment of today without worrying one second about tomorrow. Rather a luxury? Or perhaps an improbability? Either way, I can honestly say, that that was what 2012 was like for me. Not a small thing, I guess. And the year ended in champagne and a delightful little homemade marzipan ring cake (kranskage).

A new year has just begun, and I imagine that for me 2013 will mean less freedom and less cake baking, but I have now doubt that the coming year holds all kinds of new possibilities and adventures for all of us. And that it will be great!

Christmas tree

Merry Christmas everyone.

The cake consists of "P's brown cake": which is 100g syrup, 100g sugar and 100g butter melted in a pot (remember to stir), when the sugar/syrup/butter has cooled down a bit, add 2 tablespoons cinnamon,   1 tablespoons clove and 1 tablespoons cardamon. Add 250g flour. Dissolve baking soda (natron) in buttermilk and add to the dough. Bake for 30 minutes at 180 degrees.

The cake was cut out in 6 circles (9cm, 8cm, 7cm, 6cm, 5cm and 4cm diameter) and the circles were "glued" together with butter cream made with 100g unsalted sugar, 1 1/2 dl icing sugar, orange zest, and vanilla.

Birthday cake

Our daughter, Caroline, turned 1 year yesterday, which obviously called for a cake.

Regrettably, the month of December is (as you are probably aware) a busy month with very little room for play in the calendar, so I  didn't have much time to do Caroline's cake, so it had to be a very simple decoration.

It was a layered cake with strawberry syrup, strawberry mousse and chocolate ganache. Very nice!

Suitcase and book cake

A father, grand father, husband, author and lover of Rome turned 70, and as he is the father of a very dear friend of mine, I had promised to do the cake...

The cake was Victoria sponge, lemon syrup, butter cream flavoured with cocoa, chocolade ganache and marzipan. Apparently, it went down very nicely :-)

Christmas Biscuits

It's finally, finally, finally December AND its snowing! It really is the best time of the year (at least to me) and I go completely overboard in decorations, baking and presents - every year :-)

A couple of years ago my mother brought back a book from England called "Cooking for Christmas" edited by Martha Day. It's a terrific cook book full of awfully British food (rich, overly decorated and ever so yummy). Yesterday we had our selves a little Christmas/advent get-together with 40 of our closest friend ;-) and I had baked (amongst other) some lovely Christmas Biscuits, which I had seen in the aforementioned book.

It was a super party and so were the biscuits!

Oh, by the way the recipe is:
75g softened butter is mixed with 50g icing sugar and lemon rind. Beat in an egg yolk and sift in 175g plain sugar and a pinch of salt. Kead together, wrap in film and let sit in the fridge for 30 min. Roll out the dough, stamp out as many biscuits you can. Transfer to baking, mark top of biscuits with a cutter of your choice, chill for 10 min. Mix food colour with an egg yolk and pain the biscuits. Bake for 10-12 min. in a preheated oven (190 degrees). Have fun :-)

Mini cakes

For quite some time I have been wondering why my cakes seem to bulge (which is something that Peggy Porschen's cake never do!), and I came to the conclusion that it's because I always make layered cakes. The mousse simply can't stand the pressure from the marzipan and fondant, and the cake ends up being rounded on the sides.

Studying the sites of Peggy and other amazing cake-making ladies, it dawned on me that they use either mud cake or sponge cake. Both of which isn't nearly as yummy as a layered cake, but I thought I would give it go. So I made a victorian sponge cake soaked in raspberry syrup to add flavor and moist covering the cake in chocolate ganache and marzipan. To use the firmness of the sponge cake I cut out small squares of cake (5x4cm) and put them on top of each other to make miniature cakes.

My friend, H, came round for tea and chic flick, so I gave her the cakes to take home to her family, and I am still waiting to hear the judgement on the taste and texture.

But what ever the verdict is I think the miniature cake idea works.

Movie reel cake

My oldest friend has turned 40. That's completely overwhelming. 40 years. That's a whole life. And what a life. It has been so much fun and full of drama (because that's what she is like).

The cake was 27cm in diameter and 9cm high. A layered cake: three sheets of sugar cake, raspberry jam and two layers of strawberry mousse. All covered in chocolate ganache and half a kilo of marzipan.

This was by far the most difficult and frustrating cake I have made to date. As a matter of fact this cake would never have been finished were it not for the good will and help of friends and family and complete strangers!

Eva, Jon, James and Karen were kind enough to searched for and trust me with old photos of Anne Katrine to document her entire life.

My brother-in-law, Jacob, took charge of getting the photos scanned and generally setting them up and getting them ready to be printed.

At first I wasn't too impressed with the customer service displayed by KageKompagniet, but they did do an amazing print job (http://kagekompagniet.dk/)

My parents, Ingolf and Kirsten, not only babysat my daughter (so I could focus on the baking job), they also drove all the way to Rungsted to pick up the printed photos (thus saving me from a nervous fit)

Johan displayed stoic calm in the face of the cake chaos that invaded his home.

and last but not least:

Clare, a professional Australian cake maker (http://clarescakes.com.au/), who has made the best movie reel cake I have ever seen (http://www.flickr.com/photos/35918036@N08/5925965482/in/photostream), generously took time out of her very busy schedule to answer my "how-to-do"questions.

Gift box cake

Sometimes, if you are really fortunate, you may find that your neighbor is in fact your friend. Not just someone you nod to in the hallway or someone from whom you can borrow an egg or some milk in cases of emergency - but someone you enjoy spending time with. My neighbor is such a person. She is fun and kind and full of energy and good humor. And I am proud to call her my friend.

A couple of weeks ago we were talking about all the birthdays coming up in September (and all the cakes I would have to bake), and she remarked, that she wasn't expecting a cake for her birthday. I couldn't really tell her that her four year old daughter, the amazing Isabella, had in fact only a few hours before been sitting in my living room flicking through Peggy Porschen's "Pretty Party Cakes" and had requested that I make a gift box cake for her mother. How could I refuse?

The cake was a layered cake - three sheets of light sugar cakes, lemon sirup and two layers of Morten Heiberg's awesome chocolate mousse (the best ever!!!!) (http://dessertcirkus.dk/default.aspx?pageid=42)

Pink striped birthday cake

Each year, my most clever friend, S, insists that she is turning 28, and this year was no exception.

As a loving comment to this unusual case of acute amnesia (or is it selective memory?), her husband had planned to have flags, balloons, and candles and hot chocolate, scones and a birthday cake ready for her when she came home from work.

Now, as this wasn't a normal children's birthday party, the cake couldn't be childish though it had to be girlish......

The idea for the design was inspired 100% from Ban Bakes - in Paris 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bonboneh/4029574838/in/photostream

Pink elephant cake

My little friend, Isabella, turned 4 years on Friday and naturally that called for a cake.

I have a vague recollection of her requesting a "princess-cake", but I don't remember how we ended up with a pink elephant cake...... Isabella didn't seem to mind :-)

The cake was a layered cake and consisted of white almond cake, lemon syrup and strawberry mousse.

The fondant proved to be a bit of a challenge, as I couldn't get hold of any Wilson fondant and the replacement sugar past was way too soft (though it did taste better).

Rose cake

I think that most "winter-children", i.e. persons born in the Nordic countries in the period between November and March, have (at some point in their lives) wished to celebrate a birthday in the garden on a sunny day, where the roses are in bloom, rather than having a birthday party in the dark and cold just before or just after Christmas and New Years....

.....and so I thought it was utterly clever of my friend, Katrin, to move the celebration of her 40th birthday to end June - not only did she get to throw an amazing garden party, she also got to stay 39 for an additional 6 month! and I got to do the ultimate summer cake:

It took two kilos of marzipan, 180 hand crafted roses, half a kilo of chocolate, one liter of strawberry sirup and three sheets of raspberry spongecake.... and the transportation from Copenhagen to Malmø by train in 25 degrees celsius was hellish, but the end result was exactly as I had hoped for:

The design for the cake was inspired by Peggy (who else?!?) http://indulgy.com/post/xpaQxiH061/romantic-rose-towerpeggy-porschen-cakes

P.S. I will NOT be doing this cake again any time soon :-)

Horse in a field

Apparently it is possible to be a "horse-girl" even before one is big enough to ride a horse! Henriette's youngest daughter, Marie My, is such a girl - she just turned 3 years old and all she wants in life is a horse called Bruno (?!?)

I am not sure my version of a horse, which seems to be a cross-over between a cow, a donkey, a horse and a hippopotamus, would fulfill the dream in real life, but as a cake decoration is fully suffices :-)

I borrowed the cake design from my good colleague and fellow cake maker, Mai-Britt: http://www.kagerier.blogspot.dk/2012/01/heste-kage.html

Book cake

Recently my brother-in-law, who studies a the Danish School of Media and Journalism, won a poster competition for the Cultural Harbour Festival in Copenhagen, which I think is pretty impressive!

The motive he chose for the poster is abstract and very simple, and I just love it:

http://www.kulturhavn.dk/nyheder/vinderen-af-arets-plakatkonkurrence-201dmin-plakat-er-et-portret-af-havnen-og-det-liv-kulturhavn-skaber201d

So for his birthday cake I thought it would be fun to use his poster motive as a book cake cover. I think it worked quite well.

Birthday cake with miniature shoes

Turning 12 years old is quite something - last year as a normal balanced human being, before the hormonal changes turn you into a strange and scary monster for a number of years before you are transformed once again into a human being - though this time a rather grown up version of your former self....

.... anyway, Mille (the first child I met, that I actually liked - probably because she was a most unorthodox sand eating princess) celebrated her 12th birthday today at her father's house, and she had told me that she wasn't too grown up to have a cake - but she's definitely too grown up for cute animals and toys, but shoes....show me any girl who is not into shoes irrespective of age, and I will show you a liar.

Twelve shoes - one for each year. It was so much fun making it!

Red marzipan cake

For so many reasons my friend, Anne Katrine, deserved having a cake and eating it to...

and as I just happened to have some cake, some mousse (strawberry and lime), some chocolate butter cream and red marzipan, and I was more than happy to accommodate her.

Ballon cake

The birthday party we were invited to got cancelled, so this morning I found my self all caked up with no-where to go..... 

Anyway, the birthday cake wasn't quite finished, so I decided to re-design it in honor of our daughter, Caroline, who turned 5 months today - talk about having your cake and not being able to eat it, poor child ;-) 

The neighbor's children are down with chickenpox, so guess who will eat the cake tomorrow....

Electric car cake

My friend, Karin, is in the process of completing a phd-study on innovation and partnership, focusing on the development and sale of electrical cars, in particular a small car from a remarkable Norwegian company called "Think".

When she came to visit, I couldn't resist making her a cake with a model of Think's electrical car. In all fairness the original car is much better looking than my feeble attempt at modeling a car would suggest.

The cake cover and dots are made of marzipan, while the car is made out of fondant. The cake is a layered cake with raspberry creme and chocolate ganache - very yummy.

Train cake

Our young neighbor, Lorenzo, turned 1 year old, which made the perfect occasion for having a go at making a cake train.

The actual cake is a rich yet children friendly chocolate cake - as Lorenzo's father and sister, the lovely Isabella, have a thing for chocolate cakes...

My always gracious and diplomatic nephew kindly agreed, that most people, including the birthday boy, would recognize that the creation was meant to resemble a train - cheeky boy!

Roulade

I read somewhere that a roulade is a true grandmother cake - so for Caroline's grandmother's birthday I had my first go at making a roulade with strawberry and lime creme filling and covered in marzipan with marzipan flowers - practice is required, but it was fun and easy to make.

It just dawned on me, that a "true grandmother cake" is probable not a cake made for grandmothers, but a cake which is typically made by grandmothers.....

Peace cake

My sister-in-law, Anna, turned 25 and all she wanted for her birthday was peace on earth....

White spring cake

Some people are just amazing - and my friend, Edit, is such a person - fun, bright, gorgeous, kind and generous and I thought she should have a spring cake to celebrate her birthday.

I understand that her grand children appreciated the effort.....

Smerfs' cake

This year my nephew has discovered the smerfs, and he was torn between a Ninjago cake and a smerfs cake - luckely for me he went for the smerfs cake. It was great fun making the figurines - who look like they have been in a bar fight because my darling boyfriend dropped them on the floor - ups.

Italian birthday cake with vespa

My Italian neighbor, who goes to work every morning on his little scooter, turned 40. The design for his birthday cake was self evident.