Perfectly Patriotic with Stork

The Queen celebrated her 90th birthday this weekend and street parties were held up and down the country. The Mall in St James's Park, London was turned into a giant, first of it's kind, street party with 10,000 guests attending the Patron's Lunch. 

Stork challenged me to recreate one of their yummy looking patriotic cakes and we decided to bake a cake fit for a Queen, a colourful Union Jack cake. 

What the Union Jack cake should look like! 

I have to admit, baking is not something I'm a natural at and I've had more than my fair share of baking failures! But hey, Stork provided me with a fool proof recipe so I thought I'd give it a whirl...whats the worst that could happen?! (And plus I really like eating cake!)

Elliot loves helping me bake so we made a start on the recipe and everything went to plan. No eggshells went into the mixture, we didn't get flour everywhere, spoons were licked! The mixture went into the oven and we waited....

Unfortunately this is where things didn't quite go so smoothly!! When I took the cake out of the oven I realised that although I had greased the tin, it was well and truly stuck. Ahhhhh! Sadly, this is what my cake looked like : 

baking fail! 

I'm not sure even Mary Berry could salvage that disaster so after shedding a few angry tears, we started again! (The "cake" didn't go to waste though, we had it with ice cream and strawberries and it was like a very messy arctic roll!)

Fortunately my second bake was a big success.....I even used baking paper to save any sticking! Aside from my baking errors, the recipe was actually really simple to follow and one I would definitely do again. The double cream on top of the cake made it taste really fresh and light and I loved the fresh fruit on top. 

Woohoo, it almost looks like the original photo! 

We really enjoyed our baking challenge and I hope Her Majesty would be impressed at our Union Jack Cake! 

"I just need to lick it to make sure it's ok!"

For details of the recipe and more yummy looking bakes, head over to the Stork website

*Disclaimer - Stork sent me a voucher to cover the cost of my ingredients, all baking skills were my own ;) 

How Not to Bake Cakes!

I've already admitted that I'm not very good at cooking and that extends to baking too. In fact, the only thing I can make really well is tiffin cake and that doesn't even need cooking so that says it all really!!

I recently bought some dinosaur cake moulds from Tesco after admiring some tasty looking dinosaur cakes on pinterest. But sadly my dinosaur cakes turned out a bit crap....I should have let Elliot get on with it himself, he might have had a better result!!

It took a while for us to get going - Elliot found some chocolate in the baking cupboard and thought he'd have a nibble on that before doing anything else. And then he decided to play drums with his spoons on the bowl! And then when we finally got to the mixing stage he just wanted to eat the cake mix!! "Elliot eat that mummy!" . And then he was so intent on licking the spoon that he fell off the chair.....arghh...

We had high hopes as the dinosaurs went into the oven and the smell that came wafting out of the kitchen as they cooked smelt good. But sadly, they came out looking quite different from the immaculate dinos I'd found on Pinterest.....

Impressive eh!! Even Elliot looked a bit underwhelmed when I showed him. I thought maybe I could salvage the bake by decorating them nicely but Elliot then said he wanted red dinosaurs so I made up a sickly pink butter cream concoction. Hmm, how to decorate a mishapen, overweight dinosaur cake...

Please share your baking fails so I don't feel so bad ;)