The Teepee Cake Challenge: COMPLETED

So - last week I posted here about the impending Teepee cake challenge - and it all came to fruition this weekend.

I was concerned that it was my first time making a cake in a Dolly Varden tin so I made the cake the evening before hand so I'd have ample time to rectify any cake disasters.

Out came the KitchenAid to beat the orange and poppyseed batter into submission.

And I was somewhat concerned that I still didn't have enough - it barely filled the cake tin to the halfway mark.

But it rose incredibly in the oven - and thankfully didn't deflate into itself like I'd read about.

The next morning I whipped up a batch of Buttercream Icing using this recipe. (hmm I may sound casual now but I was fretting by that point - icing is not my friend - especially after the icing on my last Martha Stewart Lemon Cake didn't do so well in the heat.) 

On my first attempt at the icing it was so soft - almost the texture of raw cake batter - so I popped the bowl in the fridge to chill and hopefully firm up. But on my return the icing had stiffened up to a hard ice-cream like consistency which gave me a good fright - but after another go in the KitchenAid it was good to go.

I covered a chopping board in green wrapping paper and used grissini bread sticks for the wooden posts.

You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find cowboys and indians figurines. I couldn't find them anywhere on the weekend and was kicking myself for not being more organised and ordering some online. Mr Tchotchke saved the day and found a pack of farmyard figurines that did the job just fine.

The crowd of kids at the party swarmed around it as if that miniature horse was real.

I think it was a hit.

Pappardelle from scratch

So what do we do with all of our eggs?

Usually things get out of hand unless we make a good frittata or omelettes every week - but this week I decided to use up some eggs by making delicious pasta from scratch.

I consulted one of my favourite recipe books -The Silver Spoon for a good pasta dough recipe.

I was lucky enough to get a pasta roller attachment for the KitchenAid for Christmas - and although I'd made lasagne sheets before this was my first time making any other kind.

It's actually amazing how easy it is to use.

I don't have any of the cutting attachments so I hand cut the sheets into pappardelle using a rolling pizza cutter which was easy enough - I think I just need something to hang them off for next time - it was pretty laborious peeling each one off to drop into the pot.

And here is the finished product - with coppa ham, brown mushrooms and ricotta. Yum!

Martha's Lemon Cake

Oh Martha - I do love how you're slightly mean to all the guests on your show because they can never make their Christmas decorations as perfectly as yours - but do you purposefully make your recipes hard to navigate so our cakes never outshine yours?


I had a stab at Martha Stewart's Lemon Cake on the weekend for my Mum's birthday. 

Which of course meant that I got to use my lovely KitchenAid mixer.

Which is a good thing since I'm trying to bring down it's cost per use in order to justify it's existence in our kitchen. Can you see the 67 point planetary action?

It makes great pizza dough, and it can even roll lasagne sheets - but no it unfortunately doesn't read the recipe for you and ensure that you've printed out all the applicable pages.

It was only when I'd cooked both cakes, made the frosting, candied the lemons and was about to layer one cake on top of the other that I read the line in her recipe that mentioned lemon curd - a hyper link recipe that I suppose I should have noticed, clicked, printed and cooked earlier.. but I think Martha had buried it in the opening descriptive paragraph to ensure that my cake would never be superior to hers.. Luckily I had a jar of marmalade in the fridge that served as a perfectly fine spread between the cake layers.

Nonetheless I was pretty happy with how it turned out. The whipped frosting gradually recoiled in horror at the heat of the afternoon, but the cake inside was lovely and nobody seemed to think the marmalade filling was strange. It even looked pretty similar to the one from the recipe. See Martha, your devious plan to outsmart me was foiled..