Cake Bake in Portugal

Posted On November 11, 2014

Our Wedding Anniversary Cake 2014

As you can see from my previous posts that I am writing about our recent Portugal trip and food experiences. Its been quite few years in a row, that we plan our vacation during September, as  our wedding and my daughters Bday anniversaries fall on the same week in Sep. Apart from site seeing & relaxing, we are curious to try out new food around the places we visit. But I had not tried to make an anniversary cake by myself. Baking and decorating a cake is such a fun activity, that I didn’t want to miss this time for our family occasion.

This year, I decided that I should wet my hands in making a cake at any cost. Nothing should stop me in baking and decorating a cake – how ever the outcome may be :)… 2 weeks of Vacation, 4 total days of drive, and if I had to bake a cake and decorate with the idea I had in mind, I will end up spending the whole time in kitchen. So planning,planning, planning….The idea was to make a Flower basket cake and I planned to make all the flowers and basket ahead. One week before our Vacation, I started making flowers and basket and made them to dry well. All flowers were handcrafted and few of them were created using flower cutters.

Everyday for a week, after winding up our day around 8pm, Riya and I start our favorite sugar modelling and it will go until 11pm and sometimes 12. She likes to help me in making flowers as it was a Summer  holiday time for her. Sometimes, a ball of sugarpaste is what she needed to play and  to make her favorite figurine to give me as  a present in the evening.

Lots of trial needed atleast for making Roses. Other sugar flowers can be made easily with flower cutters. For this basket, I tried home made sugarpaste. Other parts are made from SatinIce sugarpaste and Wilton fondant.  You will also need few modelling tools to start with a simple cake. Once your interest grows, you can easily notice that your collection for cake accessories are also growing along :). Yes, I had to pack two cartons of my accessories and Cake figurines and flowers and that explains.

My Mom and me were chatting the other day before the vacation and was discussing about this… she just told me a comment, why not relaxing in Holiday and doing this after returning  home. Vacation for me is do what you like to do…even if it is hard work, at the end of the day you should feel happy..

Modelling is Ok. What about the cake? The cake tins and dry  ingredients needed for the cake are packed. I had to do a little shopping there to buy Butter and perishable ingredients. My curiosity wanted to check the cake section and see if there is any special ingredients that they use. There was big section of self raising cake flour (pre made cake flour with baking powder and baking soda) which is not very prominent here.  Ok lets pick that and try a cake with this flour..(Had a second thought in mind..if my bake didn’t turn out good, had a plan to buy premade regional cakes and decorate it with my homemade sugar flowers.) Not a bad idea hmmm..

The next Challenge was gas oven at the vacation home..Did take sometime to switch it on and there was no control to regulate the heat, but atleast happy that it had an on/off switch. Whats next, try some new flavor of cake..Until one day before had no idea what flavor to go for..But as I planned the cake to be served for our breakfast, so lets try coffee cake.

Coffee cake with its natural coffee flavor(no additional flavors)

Ingredients :

1. Self Raising flour – 1 and half cup
2. Sugar 3/4 cup
3. Egg -3
4. Coffee- 2Tbs(mixed in 20ml of warm water)
5. Milk – 100ml
6. Butter – 125gm

Method:

1. Beat Butter and sugar until soft.

2. Add egg one by one and incorporate to the mix.

3. Add flour and coffee,milk  alternating  each and mix until they are combined to a  smooth mixture.

4. Bake it for approx 1/2 an hour in an preheated oven.

Once it is cooled…I layered the cake and applied dark Chocolate Ganache like here and stuffed the cake into basket. Finally filled with sugar decorated flowers.

The Coffee cake was delicious and reminded of CoffeBite chocolate which we used to have during my school days. And the flowers on top was refreshing for our eye and no one dare to try that beautiful flowers. Those Rose flowers are smiling now in my living room.

This was our Wedding Anniversary cake..Next post will be Riya’s Birthday cake…

Yellow flower made by Riya

Flower Basket Cake

Hits: 481