Sailor cake

Christmas is almost here....But I still had some time to practice my decorating skills this year. Today I finished decorating a cake which I started making yesterday. This is the surprise cake for the birthday of a Danish sailor. His wife ordered it after I made a surprise cake for her (check out my post "Birthday cake for Jorge's friend)). I hope he is gonna like it.  It took me almost 6 hours to do all the baking,chilling the cream and decoration....I am tired but happy about the result :) I can proudly say that I haven't done anything close to it before.

 First, I baked 2 rum-chocolate sponge layers. I added chopped walnuts  to the first one and coconut flakes with raisins to the second one. The filling had 3 layer- 2 layers of raspberry butter cream with a meringue layer in the middle. The cut should remind a smile of an African man :D I covered the covered with marzipan and decorated it with waves, sea stars, stones and sailor in the boat made of fondant. I used Rolled fondant made by Wilton. It very much reminded my childhood. I spent endless hours shaping some animal figures from modeling clay. It is so much fun! My husband actually saw me jumping from happiness and screaming when I finished the cake!!!

 The cake is assembled and ready to be covered with marzipan

I'll sail away, it's time to leave
Rainy days, are yours to keep
Fade away, the night is calling my name

You will stay, I'll sail away

Marzipan and kransekager course' follow-up. Honningkager (honey cakes, similar to ginger bread)

My life tastes marzipan now! Christmas and New Year taste marzipan...whole Denmark has amazing almond paste's flavor... I am in love with marzipan, but who isn't? :P

Welcome to "Marcipan og kransekager" decoration course I took last week here in Aalborg. I was the only non-Dane who participated (later I discovered that there was also one Bosnian woman in our group). There were about 20 people of different age and gender (we had 4 or 5 men) there. We had two evening classes each of which was 4 hrs long. And we did a lot of things with marzipan- marzipan cookies, cakes and figures. We also worked with melted chocolate to make some decoration spirals for the cakes.

So, check out my progress, I did the horn-shaped cake :) Other guys did New Year clock, towers and hearts...

 Practice makes perfect. It was quite tricky to cover the bottom part of these spirals

 The horn ready for chocolate decoration

 

 Ready to be served

 

This is not my cake :)

 Marzipan New Year clock cake

 Marzipan figures

 Marzipan heart filled with marzipan cookies

 They allowed us to take home our creations. I wish I knew about this well in advance, I could have made much more :D

Marzipan cookies covered with chocolate

We bought metal forms for cookies recently, and I decided to try to bake Danish honningkager (honey cakes) for Christmas . They are not exactly the same as ginger bread well-known in North America , for which molasses is commonly used with the main spice, of course, ginger. Honey cakes have honey as a sweetener and different spices (cinnamon,cardamon, orange zest) but ginger (I put ginger anyway). They turned out really tasty. My honey ate more than 10 pieces of honey cakes at once before they even got glazed :D

This is how they looked like last Sunday:

 This is how they look today after I glazed them with whipped egg whites, confectioners' sugar and food colours

Merry Christmas to all my friends!!!

Bday cake for Jorge's friend

I am awaiting for my food colors to arrive soon... Meanwhile,I keep practicing with the same red-green ones I am stuck with :)

Today I've made a "Strawberry-butter cream symphony cake". I decorated it with marzipan topping and same marzipan roses, that I used for the Fruit cake. It was much easier this time and my hands were not shaking any longer. This cake has two layers of sponge sheets with a butter cream filling in between.  Whole strawberries are put into the cream in a spiral manner

I am so much looking forward to "Marzipan and wedding cakes decoration" course I am taking on December 7-th and 8-th!!! An update on what I've learned will be posted shortly after.