Punggol Cake

I feel a little sheepish about my long absence, but my pace of life has suddenly picked up considerably and it's become tougher to bake regularly - much less blog about my bakes. I suppose things are always tougher at the beginning, and hopefully when I am more settled down in the new job, I can gradually find time to experiment in the kitchen again! So pardon me if my updates become a bit more infrequent - but do check back from time to time!

I just wanted to share a very short update on a "fun" cake I made this week - a chocolate cake in the shape of Punggol Town, covered with caramel swiss meringue buttercream; complete with a mini Punggol Waterway and Coney Island. The little white marshmallows are supposed to represent HDB blocks along the waterway. It was a very unusual order from an architect for an urban planner's birthday. Since I've never made any odd-shaped cake before, was admittedly a little doubtful how it would turn out in the end. Thankfully all turned out well and the customers were pretty happy (not to mention amused)! :)

Learning herb-growing from the experts

It's been a while since I last posted anything about our vegetable plot - mainly because our herbs haven't been doing too well! The lady fingers are going strong and regularly producing fresh lady's fingers, but most of our herbs have died. And so we decided to sign up for NParks' How to Grow Western Herbs workshop last Sat. 

Orange spice ribbon cake

Made an orange spice cake with cream cheese ribbons last Fri - for J's birthday "party" on Saturday. My piping still needs a bit more work; but am pretty thankful that the cake still turned out looking relatively nice in a rustic way. Sadly the cake itself doesn't seem to refrigerate well, and had the tendency to harden overnight in the fridge. Perhaps it had to do with the use of butter in the cake recipe? Will probably need to R&D a bit on making fluffier cake layers before I attempt to make this again for another celebration!

More Mother's Day-related bakes!

Sorry for my semi-absence the past couple of weeks - have been preparing for and going for a few job interviews in between cake R&D attempts and occasional FB posts; and these other preoccupations have been distracting me from penning a new blog entry.

This May has been an unusually busy month for me, cake-wise. I was lucky enough to have received a few cake orders for Mother's Day (which I blogged about in the previous post). Last week also saw me making 2 cakes for family - one for my sister's birthday cum Mother's Day and another for mother-in-law. This coming weekend, a dear friend also entrusted her birthday cake-to-be into my hands...

Bakes for Mother's Day!

My kitchen has been relatively busy since returning from New Zealand - and I baked and sold two Mother's Day cakes the first week of May :)

They were pretty different - one was an elaborately piped and feel-good cream cheese rosette chocolate cake, while the other one was a more rustic and wholesome blueberry lemon almond cake. Both customers seemed to be relatively satisfied with their cakes; and so naturally I was happy too!

Now... what should I bake for my own mum? :)