Bunniversary

A year ago today a pair of bunnies came into my life.

(M., the black bunny on the left, has short cat-like ears and muttonchops. She likes ripping up paper, washing and stamping at people;
T., the silver bunny on the right, likes moving boxes, having treats – as pictured – and chasing M.
M. doesn’t like that.)

We adopted M. & T. from the RSPCA. From what we’ve been able to piece together of their background T. is M.’s mother; when they were rescued by the RSPCA T. was a year old and M. was 6 months. They were part of a large-scale rescue – apparently there was a shed at the back of a petshop that was allegedly some sort of boarding kennels; when the RSPCA arrived it was dark, with no natural light, and crammed with animals all mixed in together (and breeding together). It’s entirely probable that M. was born there; T. was potentially also born there or, sadly, someone’s pet that they left in the kennels and never came back for. Either way, that was what both of them had known for most of their lives.

(This is all we saw of them for the first few days that they moved in with us)

Their RSPCA foster carer said that they essentially spent all their time in the small, enclosed part of their hutch, hiding. They were (and still are) very nervous in general and very wary of people – all the animals from the same rescue are described in the same way which indicates that life in the shed must’ve been pretty grim. We suspect that the only human contact they ever had was when they were fed, because for the first few months that we had M. & T. they would never get excited about food (even when they were clearly hungry) and would wait for a good half an hour after we put the food down before creeping over to it. This meant that it has been really hard for us to try and tame them – we couldn’t tempt them over with a treat, nor could we give them an immediate treat if we stroked them.

(Cutest picture ever.
This was taken a few days after we got them when they were brave enough to venture further than their box. They don’t have the fencing anymore, nor the newspaper)

Over the past few months, though, they’ve become braver and more trusting – often they’ll bound over whilst we’re putting down the food, and I can usually get them to take a few bites of food out of my hand. They’ll also come over for treats now, which is great, but if you try to stroke them they run away (and stamp at you. *stamp* *stamp* *stamp*).

(T. on the approach to scope out a treat)

M. & T. are house bunnies – they live in our living room, and although it’s only been a year I can’t imagine what it would be like to not have bunnies hanging out while I’m watching TV. Despite having the most part of a 16ft x13ft room to bounce around in, they spend most of their time in – you guessed it – a small dark box.

(Actually, they’re more active at night, so although they’re in their box sleeping for most of the day, they do run around at night and spend most of the evening out of the box)

We are actually very lucky with them. Because of their various phobias (which include, and are not limited to: people; laminate floors; certain blankets; the coffee table; lettuce when held in the hand; cameras…) and the fact that they’ve never really learnt how to be a bunny (due to the dark shed thing) they don’t do the things that most rabbits do, like chew (wires or plaster off the walls), dig (at the corners of the room), gnaw (on skirting boards), try and escape… They also litter-trained themselves. They are essentially the perfect house rabbits.

What’s all this got to do with cakes, I hear you ask? Nothing, actually, as it turns out. But it has got something to do with biscuits:

(every bunniversary should be celebrated in some way. With this set up, people get the biscuits, bunnies get the Brassicaceae)

These are vegan biscuits (British biscuits not American biscuits) made using this simple – and thus achievable – recipe. They have silver balls for eyes, little icing tails, and various stars and other shapes around their necks. They also taste good. Why vegan? Well, in about 7 months when I finally get through the backlog of cakes that have built up since June to tell you about what I’m doing tomorrow, it will make more sense. Tomorrow, as it happens, will be my first opportunity to accidentally kill someone using a baked good. You have been warned.

And it turns out we can add ‘biscuits’ (even those on an enticing bed of romaine lettuce, and savoy & sweetheart cabbages) to the phobia list:

(neither bunny was having any of it; alas, any hope of a super-cute bunny/biscuit photo was soon quashed)

Toy Story 3 Fairy-Cake Mosaic

I do have lots of cakes that I want to show you, but I thought I should write about this more recent one first, since it’s a little more à la mode (that would be à la mode in the sense of ‘current’; there ain’t no ice cream here, folks) than the others.

It was my friend N.’s birthday last week, and a group of us went to see Toy Story 3 (which was very good, although as an attempting-to-be-ex- hoarder I found it really rather traumatic at times, but that’s a tale for another day) to celebrate. I wanted to make her a cake that would be easy to smuggle into a cinema and share out safely, because if there’s one thing harder to smuggle into a cinema than snacks bought off the premises, it’s a big giant cake knife. This led to the rapid conclusion, and those of a gentler disposition may need to look away, that I was going to have to do something with fairy cakes.

Now as a reader of Cake Wrecks I am fully aware that the ‘cupcake cake’ – that is, a bunch of fairy cakes glued together with a 2-inch thick layer of icing contorted into a deformed ‘picture’ – is always wrong, but I do find that the fairy-cake mosaic (pace Jen @ Cake Wrecks) can be rather charming (such as the Hungry Caterpillar that I did as part of my own birthday cakes), and thought that this would be an ideal solution to the cake-knife-in-public problem. It did, as these things doubtless do, flag up another problem: what to make, since the only successful fairy-cake mosaic on a small scale that I’ve ever seen is the Hungry Caterpillar. If I wanted to make a couple of hundred fairy cakes then I could have gone with any number of retro-computer-game pixellated images (or, if I even imagined that I might have the ability fancied making thousands, Barack Obama), but then we’re back to the needs-to-be-smuggled-into-a-cinema problem. Instead, I chose a character from the film which I desperately hoped thought could be rendered most successfully in cake-mosaic form:

(can you tell who it is yet?)

Although small, this design still took 28 mini-fairy cakes. The green buttercream icing was vanilla flavour, and the white icing (which was just thick regular icing rolled into a ball then squashed flat – it worked quite well) was strawberry flavour. And no. It’s not a mutant Yoda.

(but if a decent Star Wars film ever comes out again I’ve got a design all sorted; ditto the fish from the Simpsons)

Achievable Strawberries

1. Buy some strawberry plants from Aldi (of all places).

2. Bung them in a trough you’ve pinched from a friend, complete with old mud (pull out the most obvious weeds).

3. Chuck a bucket of water over the plants about three times a year, if you remember.

4. Note with a start that the benign neglect is evidently the way to go, since this year they have begun to fruit:

(a lovely thing to find on a gloomy day)

5. Spot that a couple of strawberries are nearly ripe, and begin to get excited.

6. Discover that more than benign neglect is needed once the strawberries are ripe, since slugs will always get there first, and begin to get despondent (and more than a little icked out).

7. Learn that most strawberry-saving tactics result in a pile of oozing slug, and decide not to try any, even if this means not having any strawberries

8. Find a solution which doesn’t involve having to scrape dissolved slug out of the garden: putting the fruit into jars, which slugs can’t climb up (add some netting too, just in case):

(my worries that the rain would drown the fruit have so far been unfounded)

9. Wait for more strawberries to ripen (temper your impatience with slug-induced worry).

10. Be as surprised as I am.

(mmmmmmm… strawberries with vanilla sugar)

Achievable Cookies

I’ve never really had much luck with biscuits, but I have had some success with the following recipe:

Delicious Cookies in Three Simple Steps

1. Go to a shop which sells delicious cookies.

2. Buy some.

3. Eat them.

(from Ben’s Cookies in Brighton. The cookies were delicious – here you see a milk choc chip cookie & a white choc chip cookie; look at the size of those ‘chips’! – but I’ll admit that I was slightly more excited about the tin)

Birthday ‘Cake’

“What’s this?” I hear you cry. “An horrific use of an unneeded, unrequired, and altogether unnecessary pair of quote marks!”

Fear not, gentle reader! For I am not about to inflict anything so eye-scrapingly horrendous on you as a pair of non-essential, indeed confusing, quote marks (‘honest’). Today is indeed my birthday, but whilst I did not have any cake (on account of the fact that I am still somewhat full of cake after last week’s cake party; plus I had cookies instead) I did in fact have, as a gift, a ‘cake’; to wit:

(modelled by my awesome stack of T. bunny cake tins which my lovely friend L. got for me for my birthday)

That, my friends, is a cake made entirely out of a flannel. (And a muffin case).

(pinhole mode makes all pictures look awesome. I love pinhole mode)

I will admit that I am as yet unsure about this particular cake’s achievability. Whilst it may look like a folded, rolled flannel which has been pulled into a point and popped into a muffin case, I am quite certain that it will be far more fiddly to pull off. These things always are.

A Very Hungry Fairy-Cake Mosaic Caterpillar

I know what this looks like, but let me assure you: I do not have a caterpillar-cake problem. Yet.

For my birthday party I had planned to make a fairy castle, a vegan gatehouse, a bunch of pumpkins and some witches hats; given that only about 9 people were coming this seemed like rather a lot as it was. But then I saw a Hungry Caterpillar cup-cake mosaic on the Cake Wrecks blog whilst browsing their [non-wrecked] Sunday Sweets section and obviously I had to make it. Not only was it the Very Hungry Caterpillar, but it was a cup-cake mosaic. A mosaic! No Hardly any actual art skills actually required!

Unsurprisingly, there were two things that I didn’t do before embarking on making this mosaic:

1) Actually look at the actual website of the actual baker who made the actual original mosiac, because – as I have now discovered – it turns out that Coco Cake Cupcakes has actually put a mini-tutorial on her website;

2) Actually look at a picture of the actual caterpillar from the actual book:

(not that I’m obsessed with making cakes out of Swiss rolls, but maybe next time I should try wedges of Swiss roll – might look more ‘accurate’)

Both of these would probably have helped more than the vague sketch I did using the picture on Cake Wrecks. For a start, I probably wouldn’t have ended up with a hunch-back caterpillar which seems to be rearing up in what I can only assume to be some kind of pre-attack pose like a Burrowing Snagret from Pikmin, and secondly I’d probably have remembered what its actual face looked like:

(actually I like its cute baby face – matches its cute baby bonnet)

All in all, however, I think it worked quite well. The mini-fairy cakes making up the body were a plain sponge with a strawberry-flavoured green buttercream icing, whereas the head is a vegan vanilla sponge, with plain red icing; I did consider trying to add variegation to the green by striping up the inside of the piping bag with blue food colouring, but I didn’t have a brush (plus: laziness). It was certainly tasty, and – when not viewed alongside either the original Hungry Caterpillar or the inspiration mosaic at least – looked cool. It’s a nice example of an achievable cake that is easy to put together using entirely home-made cakes, and while this was the first time I’ve made buttercream icing and piped it into swirls, doing this on tiny cakes was a great way to learn.

Never fear: I’m not taunting you with mention of the fairy castle, vegan gatehouse, pumpkins and witches hats – I’ll be posting each one by one over the course of the next week or so to eek out as much blog fodder as possible increase your mouthwatering anticipation.

Fancy Caterpillar

The Dalek cake started a tradition. It was a tradition that lasted a mere two weeks, but I hope to revive it at some point. The tradition was to bring a Swiss roll to our weekly Doctor Who-watching evening and decorate it using Betty Crocker pre-made icing.

This is what my friend E. created:

(shot with obligatory Doctor Who scene in the background; alas my TV is old and rubbish – don’t bother robbing my house, even a charity shop wouldn’t take it – so you can’t make out the subtitles as you could for the Dalek cake)

This cake was far more successful than the Dalek cake for a number of reasons:

1) There was only one Swiss roll. One Swiss roll is an entirely more manageable amount of Swiss roll than the Dalek cake’s two. Swiss rolls are very filling, and very sickly; especially when covered in the filling and sickly Betty Crocker’s Rich & Creamy Chocolate Frosting. What tends to happen with multiple Swiss rolls – especially those smothered in BCR&CCF – is that you become full, and sick, and then end up with cling-film wrapped chunks of BCR&CCF-covered Swiss rolls in your bread bin for far longer than is ideal.

2) It was structurally sound. There are two explanations for this: a) there was only one Swiss roll and therefore nothing had to be stuck to anything else; b) it was one Swiss roll, lying down on a plate. This was, I feel, the key to its stability. At no point were two other people required to try and hold the Caterpillar together or upright with palette knives, whilst a third frantically attempted to ice it. In fact, E. iced this cake all by herself.

3) Instead of using BCR&CCF, E. selected the vanilla flavour – which was much nicer and much less sickly than the chocolate one.

4) Colour-coordinated French Fancies. Need I say more?

OK. Now it starts.

In 1966 on Blue Peter, Valerie Singleton showed children everywhere who had a TV how to make a range of Dalek-shaped foodstuffs. There was the Dalek cake, on which there will be more later; a Dalek sweet, which is essentially a Walnut Whip with a marshmallow on top; and a Dalek pile of sandwiches which is, well, a pile of sandwiches, cut into a vaguely cylindrical shape.

I was very taken by the Dalek cake which, being made entirely out of shop-bought Swiss rolls, seemed eminently achievable, and decided to bring to ingredients for it with me to our weekly Doctor Who-watching evening.

(I do think that the pile-of-sandwiches Dalek looks more like a pile of scones)

My Dalek cake does not, alas, look quite as – shall we say – polished as Valerie’s Dalek cake. Ignoring cosmetic discrepancies, like a lack of liquorice bootlaces in the Co-Op meaning that I had to use Strawberry Shoelaces and ended up with a Rambo-Dalek, there were two key steps which I decided – foolishly – to ignore:

1) Use cocoa-flavoured butter icing;

2) Level the Swiss rolls before continuing.

Home-made cocoa-flavoured butter icing seemed like far too much of a hassle, given that I am very lazy and I had a pot of Betty Crocker’s Rich & Creamy Chocolate Frosting in the cupboard. What I failed to take into account was the fact that BCR&CCF does not actually set, but stays ridiculously gooey.

This had disastrous consequences for the structure of the cake, given that I also flagrantly ignored Key Step #2 (what can I say, it looked stable at the time). Using BCR&CCF as mortar between the two cakes did not so much stick them together as it did loosely tack them. As I then tried to ice the cakes with the BCR&CCF their unlevel base came back to haunt me, and the entire structure threatened to fall apart.

We had to stop icing before the Dalek was completely covered to try and get the decorations on before total collapse. It just about held together for its photo, and then we put it out of its misery. It was tasty. But man, that was a lot of Swiss roll.

(this was its good side; just imagine what the other was like)