Salaric Cooking

I made these ring cakes to celebrate the Olympics today – I put cake mix in our doughnut maker.

250 g of caster sugar

250 g of softened butter

250 g of self raising flour

4 eggs (I only had two unfortunately which maybe why my didn’t rise correctly)

4 table spoons of milk

1 table spoon of vanilla extract

I creamed these ingredients together and snipped the end off of a disposable piping bag and filled it the cake mix. I then pipped this into the doughnut machine. I had to do a bit of trial and error to work out a good amount. I found filling the troughs up and closing the machine for 7 minutes worked best. I had an issue with them falling to pieces as I was trying get them out of the machine but found that if I slightly over filled so that an apron of escape mix surrounded each ring then I could use this to pull the rings out. I then snipped the excess cake off with scissors.

I then poured out a bit of fondant icing mix into five bowls and added food colouring for each of the different rings of the Olympic flag. I then added a bit of water to each until I got the correct consistancy. I then duked the rings and popped them into some nice cake cases that I thought matched the abstract sporty look I was going for.

I decided to make cup cakes to celebrate the Olympics as they are about to start here in the UK.

I started by baking vanilla cupcakes.

Then I made up some butter icing – in this case I used goats butter as it tend to be a lot paler and so gives a whiter icing.

300 g of icing sugar

150 g of butter

1 table spoon of orange extract

A little milk

Blend the sugar and butter together, add the extract and drizzle a little bit of milk in at a time until it goes a nice creamy consistency.

Then prepare the icing bag. I use the easy grip, ultra strong disposables as I found weaker ones brake and the non disposable ones kept splitting after one use anyway.

I cut the end off and popped a large nozzle with lots of thing spikes on it (hopefully I will add a photo later as trying to describe it is hard!). I then placed the bag nozzle down into a tall glass. I then dipped a wooden skewer into gell food colourings representing the five colours of the Olympic Rings and dragged them along the inside of the icing back in a line (one at a time!). This ment I ended up with a five coloured star coming up from the nozzle. I then spooned the icing into the bag, twisted the end shut and began icing.

I started at the edge of some of the cakes and came round in a spiral to created a mounded ice cream effect. Others I started in the middle and worked my way out moving the nozzle around relatively fast to create a flowery effect.

It think it worked really well.

I mixed them in with other sporty influenced cakes.