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Make it Monday: Christmas Cake Decoration

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So it’s late, but I made it AFTER last week’s Make it Monday therefore you’re getting it now.

This cake design is inspired by a picture in the hobbycraft magazine.

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I started with a basic sponge recipe, but instead of vanilla flavouring my mother chose Valencian orange. For whatever reason my cake barely rose despite this being the usual recipe I use but it was one of those days and actually I’d given up caring. Next I mixed up a basic butter cream this was without flavour as the orange flavour also had an orange cast to it and I wanted the butter icing to be as white as possible as it’s representing snow! Crate your landscape however you want. I wanted snow drifts but didn’t quite have as much butter icing as I’d hoped.

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Once that was complete thee2 next step was to get out some green icing! I used fondant icing, but you could always use sugar paste which is slightly stiffer or even flower paste which will dry completely hard. I chose just the two colours, but I vaguely had the notion I could combine the two to make a mid green. I didn’t because at that point I’d had enough, but the option was there. I also had a collection of green tone glitte

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Having never made trees before – and not actually having the reference picture with me because that would be sensible – I just kind of made it up. I covered my hands in icing sugar and then I sort of rolled it, into a sausage sort of shape, then made it narrower at one end till it tapered into a sort of point. Then I cut it off with a knife and sort of dabbed at the edges to make it more rounded and tree like? Maybe.
We had no pretzel sticks because apparently you can’t get them at Christmas or at least not where we shopped, so I used tooth picks instead. This sort of begs for smaller trees though…

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I folded some glitter into parts of the icing to create glittery trees. This worked better with the dark green glitter in the dark icing, the pale on pale didn’t work at all! I didn’t try the turquoise – I didn’t think it was very tree like. I made various sizes and discovered that it was a good idea to stick the stick into the cake first THEN stick the tree onto it or the stick would poke through the tree.

Then it’s  just a question of artistic judgement. What size you want and where you want to put them. Mine look a little sparse I have to admit, but by this point I was beyond fed up. Of course, the first layout was best! This is the third…

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CONCLUSION:

Definately need to try this with bigger trees and actual pretzel sticks. Looks good in the cake dome though! Like a snow globe…

pamspaein

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