December’s Reward: a New Years treat.

Well, I had promised the staff “something with Ginger” as the reward cake for December, but I don’t think they were expecting this!

The windows are isomalt and the signs are royal icing, piped onto grease proof paper the day before assembly.

 

 

 

 

 

I delivered this at opening time on New Years day, and I don’t think the staff being hungover did anything to diminish their astonishment. I had, in fact, mentioned my plans to several people so wasn’t quite expecting them to be SO astonished.

 

For the Gingerbread I adapted a BBC recipe by adding 1/2 tsp of ground nutmeg and a pinch of ground cloves. I felt that this gives a better all around flavour, backing up the ginger. I had come across this by fluke, when making biscuits with the same recipe I found that I only had 1 tsp of ginger in the entire house(!) so added the nutmeg and cloves to make a christmas spiced biscuit instead.

 

This was the only deviation from the recipe, which you can find here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/gingerbread_men_99096

 

I used a thick royal icing to stick it together and to pipe the signs with. If I had time I would have let down some of the icing to fill in the signs, as this would have made for a smoother finish.

 

The most important stage was working out the template. I did this by using the photos of the actual shop (the ones above) and, in powerpoint, created line drawings of each side of the building I wanted, plus the support pieces. Once I had these right I printed several copies, and on each cut out different features. So one copy was just the outline, one was the outline with the windows cut out, and one was all the bits which stuck out. I kept the in between bits to trace the signs onto.

 

With these I trimmed each piece both before and after baking to make sure they were right. The sooner out of the over the better for trimming as once they firmed up it was very difficult to get a clean cut. I had to us the isomalt filling the windows to keep several of the frames from falling apart, luckily no one noticed.

 

I cut the windows after baking, this was more forgetfulness than planning. I had been planning to use the more traditional method, of baking with a crushed boiled sweet in the hole, to achieve the windows. In the end though the isomalt was so good that I had to cover the floor of the building with the icing, since the windows were so clear that all the glue holding the building together was very visible.

The confession: what and why

I’m Emily, and I love baking! However, due to being far to good at finishing off anything that I make, I am also on a diet. Hence I had to stop baking, unless I have to give it away.

 

It helps that I work in a cafe, I do bake there a minimum of once a fortnight. However, there isn’t a great deal of variety… I can make several varieties of crumble from memory.

 

The cafe is attached to a shop, and the staff from the shop come up for lunch every weekday. They will usually take their food to the staff room, because there usually isn’t room for them to sit in the cafe, but they frequently forget to bring the crockery and cutlery back to the cafe. This has led to me making several back-breaking trips back to the cafe with trays piled high with plates.

 

After one such trip, where I had to leave several items behind for fear that the tray would break, I decided that something had to change. The current system of a sign in the staff room reminding people to return plates, and a harassed phone call when there was more customers than plates in the cafe, clearly wasn’t working.

 

As the main person from the cafe who was making these trips to collect crockery it was in my interest to prevent them from occurring. So I had a brainwave: I knew that the shop staff love cake, and they knew that I made really good cakes (I had made some for various people’s last day), so I decided to bribe them! 

 

For every month that went by with out me having to collect any piece of crockery or cutlery, I would make them a cake.

 

I introduced this system at the start of November, and so far they have been very good and got two cakes. 

 

Now I am going to share the experiment with you. I am using the cake a month to try new recipes and experiment with techniques and decorations. So this blog is going to be a place where I write about what worked and what didn’t, as well as discuss how the experiment is going.