Cake Mountain

For a blog which will be predominantly concerned with baking, this seems like an appropriate post to start with. Cake, cake, oh and a some more cake (a few biscuits thrown in too)

It was my Mum’s 60th Birthday over Easter, so she decided to celebrate it over the next weekend – that of the 30th April (long before a certain couple kindly gave us an extra day off)
She foolishly mooted the idea that it might be nice to host afternoon tea and cakes for all her friends. My sister and I sprung into action and thus began the creation of TheCakeMountain.

After much debate about what cakes to make, rifling through many books, blogs and magazines (see list at the end of the post) we decided to bake ahead as much as we could one day. So, I trundled off to Reading and we spent a happy day making Viennese biscuits, Chocolate and Vanilla cookies, Orange and coconut cupcakes, and two very large lemon drizzle wedding-cake style sponges.

It’s great how easily you can freeze baked goods. Whilst I would normally avoid doing so (you can’t beat fresh), it was essential in this case as I was still baking most of the week beforehand as I made my first  macarons, friands, tuiles, iced buns, profiteroles and eclairs. I think I got a bit over excited. I will write about each item in more detail individually, but in the meantime here’s a bit of a taster and some of the recipes we used so that you can compare notes with me.

Lemon and raspberry macarons & mini blueberry friands

Tuiles, brownies, cupcakes and macarons

Iced buns

Main macaron recipe: The Pink Whisk

Chocolate and Spuculoos macarons: The Boy Who Bakes

Friands: Waitrose

Iced Buns: BBC GoodFood

Tuiles: BBC food by Ross Burden

Profiteroles and eclairs: BBC food by Simon Rimmer

The giant lemon “wedding” cake (with no marzipan thanks to Lorraine Pascale’s icing know-how): BBC GoodFood

And various other recipes from a Sainsbury’s Cakes and Cookies magazine which will be forthcoming