Panic about the Disco

The book has 50 recipes.

The first cake on the list to be made is the Disco Cake!

This was requested by a colleague who is moving next week and we are going with a bit of a pinky-purply theme. I am quite pleased that it is a bit of a more simple cake for the first one.

The cake will be a vanilla sponge with vanilla buttercream and a fruity jam. While I will make the sponge and cream, I won't be making the jam. Maybe in the future I will start to make some jams to use in the recipes but for now, in the words of Ina Garten, store bought is fine.

I have never worked with fondant before.

The book calls fondant, moulding icing, rather than fondant, and a recipe has been given for the reader / baker to use. For this first recipe however, just even on the basis of timing, I will stick to store bought for now - especially as I have never worked with it before.

I am a little bit anxious about all of these joined up bits and making the full effect...well....effective!

I anticipate I will make two cakes, one for the base and one for the rest. The speakers are made out of chocolate bars but I might just go for cake and sweeties etc. The cake needs to be gluten free for the most part and I am not entirely sure what to do about filling.

In the depths of my mind I remember cakes that rather than being filled, the fondant was stuck on to the cake by the jam and buttercream. Sickly supermarket fondant cakes with balloons on the top but with the filling on the outside! It will be a sheet cake so I can't necessarily slice it without potentially breaking it. I could perhaps split it in half and work on a smaller basis but we will see.

I will attempt to film part of, or all of, the process as I have purchased a little tripod to use in the kitchen. It may be for the first few I just stick to images and voiceovers or maybe even just to this written format with some photos. I will tell you all about the ups and downs and process and what went well, what didn't and how the cake was received. I plan to give each of the cakes ratings on flavour, decoration and ease of baking as a minimum and where I use recipes from other creators, bakers, chefs or what have you, I will link them to the blog.

I am going to look about adding an extra page to the blog to have a list that shows each cake, the date/event it is down for, the ratings and a comparison picture of my cake vs the book image!

So far friends, family and colleagues have accounted for at least 15 or so of the cakes. Where someone wants a specific cake I will probably do a duplicate and still make a new cake on principle around the same time to replace it in the timeline, and I still potentially anticipate a cake party at the end of all this (hopefully a summer BBQ party at that).

Thank you for anyone out there in the universe who is reading and following along on this journey. You're all pretty cool. Which is good, as I am absolutely not.