St. Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patrick's Day to all you Irish and non-Irish.

Here's a cake I made for the occasion which isn't exactly the cake I had in mind to make. I was actually aiming to make this cake but then my food colouring wasn't working and didn't darken my cake sponges at all. I didn't also want to add any more colouring as I didn't want it to go bitter so I just left it.

At first I also decided to use the sponge for Victoria sponge cake but I didn't have any self-raising flour so I had to use plain flour and baking powder instead; the cake didn't rise and ended up really tough nearly like a stone (gasp!) and bitter too because of the colouring.

So then I reverted back to what my mind still had fresh in it's stores which is the genoise sponge. We had just finished making these in college and I actually practised this 3-4 times there and if you follow me on Instagram there would be a load of pictures there of those from college.

I used that sponge for this cake and also used sugar syrup to moisten the cake but it's still not as moist so I'm still trying to look for a good liquid that doesn't alter the taste as much unlike orange juice or liquor so any suggestions would be helpful :)

In the end, I just decided to rely on the icing/decoration to make this cake some what St. Patricks related so I coloured my cream with a lot of food colouring and added loads of sugar to make sure it's not bitter (and it's so not :) yay) and as you can see, even with the cream, the colouring didn't really colour much so I think next time I will use gel/paste instead of liquid.

I just piped randomly around the cake to cover it (still practising with my piping and my piping nozzles and this was the first time I used them so excuse my skills haha) and then I got an idea of making shamrock chocolate motifs. Then when the cake was finally in the the fridge all covered with shamrocks and icing, I suddenly got an idea, BAM! Duh? Golden coins of course! Got some gold coins the next day from the market and placed them around the cake and voila!

Definitely going to attempt the ombre cake sometime again in the future but for now, here's my St. Patrick's Day cake.