Penguin Cake

Yesterday I made a penguin cake for my son's birthday party. I am really happy with how it came out.

I copied the idea from this blog: "Fowl Single File: There's a Penguin in my Fridge" which I found after doing a google image search for "penguin cake".

I used a box of (Betty Crocker's) Devil's Food Cake mix and baked a bit less than half of it in an 8" small round cake, and the rest in a pyrex bowl which roughly the same diameter (this will took about twice as long as the baking time for the round cake). I put these in the fridge overnight. In the morning I trimmed them to match, and stuck them together with some (Betty Crocker) chocolate frosting. I then put an entire tube of black food colouring in the rest of the chocolate frosting (which made it dark brown) and iced the cake. The eyes, tummy, nose, feet and hat are fondant icing. I bough white ready to roll icing. The pupils were dabs of the chocolate frosting, and a lot of orange and green food colouring when into making the orange and green bits! If I did this again I might buy ready coloured fondant icing.

Panda Hat

I just finished this panda hat. I modified this pattern for a bear hat (link) by adding a panda face from this design (link) and doing in the ears in black. The only problem is it's too small for my son (intended recipient) who is 3. It's probably suited for a 6-9 month old, so I will have to decide which friend's baby is to get this soon. :) 

Added: my Mum suggested if I had a border at the bottom it might be modified still to fit my son... Going to have a think about that.

Chocolate Covered Cheerio Biscuits

With the leftover chocolate from decorating the star biscuits I made chocolate covered cheerios. I added a bit of honey and some raisins in case the chocolate wasn't sweet enough. They're pretty good actually.

"G" and Star Shaped Biscuits.

I made "G" and star biscuits to send into nursery for my son's 3rd birthday.

They are simple American sugar biscuits from my copy of the 1001 Tempting Treats book.

I decided to try decorating with chocolate. The G's didn't come out that great. 

But I like the effect on the stars. 

Hello World

I don't really need another blog! I currently have two personal blogs (a private one for pictures of the kids, and a public one about science/astronomy). I also contribute to/run an additional 3 blogs about science topics (Galaxy Zoo, LOFAR-UK and the University of Portsmouth Athena SWAN blog).

But still.... this is going to be a place where I post about cooking, baking and knitting projects. Mostly for myself to remember what I did but I'll leave it publicly viewable in case anyone finds it helpful.

So hello world.