Archaeology Cake

Recently it was 'Archaeology Week' at work, and I made a cake for one of our events. Cake seems like the perfect way to interpret archaeology, since as you eat the cake you are excavating it! Of course it was a layer cake to represent the soil stratigraphy seen on a real site. There were three layers (or strata): chocolate, yellow cake with chocolate fudge, and vanilla (or we could call them modern topsoil, a cultural layer, and subsoil!). 

 

I created a fondant archaeologist, excavating part of the cake. She has a screen to look for artifacts, a bucket of dirt (cookie crumbs) and rocks (chocolate rock candy) and a fondant trowel. I used various colours of fondant that I rolled out to create the look of the stratified soil that she is excavating.

I even included a wooden floor that she is just uncovering. Maybe there are some artifacts down there too!

 

Everyone loved excavating their piece of cake!

Romance Cupcakes

So last week one of my co-workers had a birthday. We found out the date only the day before but still wanted to do something special. She loves reading and writing fiction, especially romance. So another co-worker and I decided to make cupcakes with romance novel toppers. My co-worker made the cupcakes, and I made the fondant novels to top them, and we met early to put them together. 

They turned out pretty cute, and luckily we chose her favourite, Pride and Prejudice!

This one was my favourite (topper that is, I haven't read the book, but it's on my list!):

Farm Cake

Recently there has been a lot of press about the closure of the prison farms in the news. The Harper government is planning to close all six of the rehabilitative prison farms across Canada, two are located in the Kingston area. I didn't know much about this topic until I was contacted by a local Kingston group to make a cake for an event against the closure of the prison farms.

The cake was a gluten free white cake. I like to use a mixture of rice flour and tapioca flour for gluten free cakes, since the tapioca flour makes it nice and fluffy. Here is my recipe:

1 cup white rice flour
1 cup tapioca flour
2 teaspoons xanthan gum
1 ½ cups sugar
1 teaspoon salt
3 ½ teaspoon baking powder
½ cup shortening
1 cup milk
1 teaspoon vanilla
3 eggs

Heat oven to 350°. Grease baking pan. Measure all ingredients into a large bowl. Blend 1/2 minute on low speed, scraping bowl constantly. Beat 3 minutes on high speed, scraping bowl occasionally. Pour into pans. Bake 40-45 minutes for oblong, 30-35 for round, and 15-20 for cupcakes.

I iced the cake in buttercream, added chocolate crumbs (not gluten free) and made fondant vegetables to make a very cute veggie patch of cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers, radishes, and pumpkins.

The cabbage on the left is my favourite.