A-Level Results Day 2015 - Don't panic!

Tomorrow for many students is perhaps the most nerve wracking day ever. Its A-Level Results day, which means students from around the country will be receiving their exam results and finding out whether they got the grades for their university placement. (Or whatever was needed for their next step.). This was me nearly a year ago, I was scared, nervous, somewhat excited but most of all - anxious! No matter how much I told myself; 'I revised its okay' or 'at least you wrote something!' nothing was putting my mind at ease the night before. On my results day I found out I had gotten into university before actually finding out my grades, so luckily for me my worries weren't so heightened by the time I had arrived to collect them! As is the case all my worrying led to nothing, I was so happy with my results and my friends also got the results they were hoping for as well. The relief was immense!

So why am I telling you all this? If you happen to be reading this and are going to collect your results tomorrow, just know that everything will be okay! I have been there, I understand that right now you will think nothing will be okay but I'm telling you it will. If you get the grades you wanted and hoped for, awesome!! (I know you will) But even if in the case that you don't, there are always - ALWAYS, measures in place to help you out. So please, promise me no more worrying! Below is a little picture I made with just a few tips (do's & don'ts) that may help you out if you need it  -

And that's it for today's post! Good luck to all receiving their results tomorrow - I hope you get all that you deserve! Like I said try not to worry, because in the words of Bob Marley, every little thing - is gonna be alright *cue song* - 

(Thanks Bob!)

Ricicle x

Take On A Bake - (Off!) / Madeira Cake

Hi guys! So this is the first of my little series called 'Take on a Bake - (Off!)'. This is inspired by the new series of The Great British Bake Off - a show I really enjoy. Each week I will choose a recipe that was attempted by the contestants on the show and basically 'have a go at it'. This is purely for fun and I hope you enjoy seeing my attempts. So anyway on with this week!

This week one of the challenges was for the contestants to make a Madeira Cake. If you're a little bit of a history nerd like me and want to know the history of the Madeira Cake - CLICK HERE. So here we go with our attempt at the - dun dun dun - Madeira Cake!

For this recipe I actually used the very same recipe that one of the contestants used - Marie's! I felt this made it more 'Bake Off-y' (my attempt at word play) as it was from one of the contestants! I have provided a link to the recipe but if it makes it a little bit easier for you I will copy what you will need so you don't have to open too many links! (Just know that all credit obviously goes to her!)

LOOK AT ALL THE COLOURS

Okay so these are all the ingredients you will need -

• Caster Sugar
• Unsalted Butter (However I used Stork because Stork is my favourite butter to use for cakes)
• Self Raising Flour
• 3 Eggs
• 3 Oranges
• 2 Lemons
• Icing Sugar 
• A pinch of salt!

P.S. Ignore the pineapple chunks in the picture! (I had already uploaded the picture before I realised - silly me!) 

Okay the first step in Marie's recipe is;

1. Preheat the oven to 180C/165C Fan/Gas 4. Grease a 900g/2lb loaf tin with butter and line with baking parchment. 

Pretty simple stuff - so now for the second step;

2. In a bowl, cream the sugar and butter until pale and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating between each addition. Fold in the flour, a pinch of salt and the citrus zests.

I photographed each stage of this step so hopefully it will give you a guide at what the mix should look like.

After creaming the 150g of caster sugar and the 150g of butter!

Adding in each egg one at a time (I didn't pre-beat the eggs - I just cracked them straight into the mix and beat them from inside that - but one egg at a time).

The recipe didn't say whether the flour needed to be sieved in but I did anyway. #Yolo

- Additionally when it comes to folding in flour I tend to use a spatula as I think it allows me to make sure every little bit gets mixed in!

After folding in the 200g flour!

This is where you also add the pinch of salt!

ADD IN THE ZESTS AND MIX IN WELL!














Onto step 3! -

3. Pour the batter into the prepared tin, smooth the surface and bake for 1 hour. Check the cake after 40 minutes, if it is starting to brown too much cover with aluminium foil for the remaining cooking time. The cake is cooked when a skewer inserted into the centre comes out clean.

 All ready to go!

ONE HOUR LATER ...

It went ok guys!

We have one half of a Madeira Cake! Hooray!

So continuing on from Marie's recipe we have step 4 -

4. Leave the cake to cool in the tin while you make the sugar syrup.

Another simple step - we like those. 

5. To decorate, cut the lemon and orange rind into very thin strips. Add 100ml/3½fl oz water and the caster sugar to a saucepan over a low heat, stir gently until the sugar is dissolved. Bring to the boil then add the rind to the pan, reserve a few strips of rind for decoration. Cook for about 5 minutes until a syrup forms and the rind is translucent.

Like I did for step two I will include images so it will give you a rough idea of how it should look. 

My very thin strips of both the orange and lemon skins! (rinds)

 The 100ml of water and 75g caster sugar. The caster sugar will eventually dissolve!

After the caster sugar has dissolved you need to wait for the water to boil and then add the orange and lemon bits. After a time it will begin to bubble and turn into a syrup! This also smells delicious!












Step 6 now!

6. Brush the syrup over the still-warm cake and set aside to cool completely. When the cake is completely cold, remove it from the tin.

Looking pretty yummy

At this point I was getting really excited because I've never made this type of cake before and I was pretty chuffed with the candied fruit and syrup. But anyway, now is time for the final step - step 7!

7.To make the icing, mix the citrus juices. Mix the icing sugar with enough juice to make a thin icing. Drizzle the icing over the cooled cake and finish with a few thin strips of citrus rind.

For the first half of the step I didn't take any pictures however it was pretty simple, I just added a teeny bit more icing sugar as the icing wasn't as thick as I would have liked it - but once I got icing I was happy with it looked something like this; 

Shiny!

I chose to not add any more strips of citrus rind for the top of the icing as for me the ones in the syrup were enough.

Anyway once all that properly dried I tidied it up a little and here is the finished product - 

So I hope you enjoyed reading this post as much as I enjoyed baking the cake! I have never attempted this kind of cake before so I am pretty proud of myself. Like I said this 'Take on a Bake (Off!)' series is inspired by the show 'The Great British Bake off' and the credit for the recipe goes entirely to the lovely contestant Marie. (To whom I wish all the best for in the show) 

As far as I'm aware next week's episode revolves around biscuits so that should be fun! 

Thank you for reading and if you are a fan of the Great British Bake Off be sure to let me know who your favourite contestant is! (I'm so far undecided - however my past favourites were Howard and Norman!) 

Ricicle x

Whimsical Rainbow Cupcakes! (with pictures)

A.K.A. my best attempt yet using food colouring!

Okay so I know I said I'd tell you some facts about me today but I was so excited from creating the blog that I really just wanted to get started with a cake post. (Sorry - but I will tell you some facts about me soon) 

I wanted to show you guys these colourful cupcakes that I made a few days ago - they remind me of one of my favourite childhood books - The Cat in the Hat. I don't really know why but hey ho!

(I like polka dots - can you tell?)

How cute are they?! I was so impressed with the colour both on the butter cream and the sponge itself as when I've tried to do it before the colour didn't turn out quite the way I'd have hoped. Coincidentally it was my third time trying this out so third time lucky guys!

So anyway that's all I really wanted to show you but if you'd like to know how to make these cakes I'll provide everything I used and did below!

The recipe I use for the sponge has always been my go-to cake mix, I've used it for a few years and after some practice every batch is a good batch of cakes! If you would like to follow the sponge mix I use CLICK HERE, but by all means if you have a preferred method then go ahead and use that. Its once the sponge mix is all ready to go that we can have the real fun.

Once your sponge is ready to go you will need to get your food colouring! I really wanted to use rainbow colours so I opted for red, orange, green, blue and pink - however you can use as many or as little colours as you want. Now, regarding food colouring I have never had the best experiences, they have either turned out looking mouldy or just not bright enough for my liking, however recently, I stumbled upon Pro Gel rainbow dust and that will forever be the food colouring I use for future bakes. (Its brilliant!) Anyway - split you're sponge into however many colours you are using, e.g. if you are using 5 colours, use 5 bowls. And then add a small amount of your dye in each of the bowls and mix!

Once each bowl is properly mixed add in your colours to your cupcake cases. There are two ways for you to do this;

1. The first method is to add a colour and then flatten in down so the colour touches each edge of the case - so from a side view it will look stripy. I tried this for the cakes in the pictures above and it worked fine but some of the colours from a side view looked very thin. For example - 

   

   This is what I mean - you can see lots of orange and red however not so much of the blue! 

2. The second is to simply just throw the colours in at a time - making sure they don't mix with each other obviously. Since making the above cakes I did try this method and personally I thought it looked better both on the side and when you took a bite out of it! Here's a example picture of what I mean for the second method. -

Literally just throw them in! (Ok maybe not literally)

So once all this colour lark is done with put them in the oven for around 15-20 minutes - for me the cakes are done for bang on 15 minutes.

And voila! - Colourful cakes!

The next part for me - usually - is very 'faffy' and that's the butter cream. For these cakes I used the Betty Crocker Vanilla Butter cream Style Icing and again just split it into as many colours as I wanted and mixed them in with the colours. For the butter cream I used orange, blue, pink and green as I wanted colours that would really stand out against each other. Once this is done its then time for the piping bag! Dun dun dun!

For this magical method I actually have one large piping bag which is split into 3 small bags, so I can add my different colours and connect them all together and then the three colours come out nicely (I swapped between the green and blue colours). I purchased mine at Hobby craft but I'm assuming there are some elsewhere! However (I am yet to try this) but I have read and seen on videos that you can achieve the same affect by using one piping bag and adding in the colours individually by rotating the piping bag so they don't touch. When all the colours are in the piping bag just simply push down and begin decorating like you usually would. There are plenty of videos explaining this method in better detail than I can. 

Once piping is done you will have cupcakes that (hopefully) look playful and colourful! You can either choose to leave them as they are or if you are like me you can decorate them with some white pearl balls - or anything! 

Just as a disclaimer I am not a professional baker by any means - nor do I claim that this is the best method for achieving these cakes. I just enjoy baking in my free time and wanted to share with you my excitement for my first successful food colouring attempt! Thank you for reading and if you do try making these cakes please let me know! 

Again sorry if there are any spelling mistakes or badly worded sentences, I'm new to blogging and although I'm very excited to be doing just that I'm a tad bit anxious, hence any mistakes or 'waffley bits'. 

But thank you for reading and have a lovely day!!

Ricicle x 

Hello there!

HELLO FRIENDS!

Thank you very much for visiting my blog - I hope you are having a good day - if not here is a joke I just read - 

"What did one bean say to the other bean?

How you bean?"  

I know it was bad but it was one of those 'good bad' jokes right? Anyway - hello there! I'm Ricicle! I'm super excited whilst typing this as I have been wanting to make a blog for a while now but I've been totally clueless as to what to call it. The name may still change but I went for Short Cake for the two reasons below,

1. Because I am very very very small in reality - all my family and friends refer to it and honestly, I like being small - so I wanted to reference it in my blog name.
2. Because I like to bake cakes - lots and lots of them, and I'm hoping to make posts about the cakes I've made, pictures and all!

So ta-da welcome to Short Cake! Like I said I hope to type up posts about recipes I have tried but I also want to talk about other things, either to help or entertain. Anyway, whether you come here for cakes or help or for any other reason, I hope we can become friends! I will try my best to write on here as much as I can. I'll maybe put up a post tomorrow with some facts about me!

Anyway as I'm typing this its 12:13am and I'm starting to get sleepy so I think I'll say goodnight for now! 

I'm so worried this will be worded wrong or they'll be spelling mistakes - so forgive me if there is!

Goodnight my new friends, thanks again for visiting!

Ricicle x

<- A mini me! (Kinda)
^- I made this Here! (just in case you'd like to make one!)