Black Icing Doesn't Work

Since I last wrote, we've made 2 more batches of cakes. The first of these was unremarkable. The cake recipe worked. We used 55g in each cake - still a bit too much - and we used glace icing and various decorations. The best of these was a simple golden bow made from thin (1/2 cm) gold ribbon. We put a candle on one and gave it to Dave - my friend's husband - for his 50th birthday. Luckily, Jonathan came home from university and ate quite a few of the remaining cakes.

Last week, we decided to make a large batch for Charlotte's Christmas gathering. This time, we got more organised for the decorating. I bought some nozzles and some gold food colouring. And a packet of ready-made fondant icing from Sainsbury's in four colours - red, yellow, black and green.

This time, our first batch of cakes didn't turn out right. They were pale and sank in the middle. I put this down to using the wrong setting on the oven and opening the oven before they were ready. It took two more attempts before we got back to our previous standard of cake making. We now know that the cakes take 18 mins to cook and need to be done on the oven setting next to 'off'. And we decided to ice the 2nd and 3rd batches. Oh, and we have now settled on 45g as the correct amount of cake batter per cake.

This time, we used fondant icing to cover the cakes. I made this using a recipe in my M&S cake decorating book - and then made it runny enough to pour on the cakes following instructions in the Women's Weekly book. (More about the books in a separate post.) This was a great improvement on the glace icing. When we ate the cakes, the icing stayed on them, instead of coming off on the paper and making our fingers all sticky. But much more fiddly, so I don't know how we are going to make enough for the number of cakes we'll need to make for the 'big day'.

Then came the decorating. Charlotte mixed up some royal icing and added gold food colouring - but she didn't like the resultant colour and so began adding red food colouring - and we ended up with salmon pink icing.

We had covered about 2/3 of the cakes in white fondant and had a lot of fun writing and drawing different designs on the cakes. When we needed some fondant for the remaining cakes we thought we'd melt one of the packs from Sainsbury's - and C thought that the salmon pink would look best on a black background. So we ended up with about 6 or 7 cakes iced in black with salmon pink decoration. This didn't work. No one wanted to eat the black cakes. Not even Jonathan and his friends.