nic cooks

It’s one whole year since I wrote my first dedicated food blog post.  Inspired by the film Julie and Julia, I decided I would cook my way through my Jamie Oliver cook book collection and write about it on our blog.  It quickly became bigger than just Jamie.  I realised that blogging about other peoples recipes wasn’t really where my heart lay, and I actually wanted to write about recipes that I had created myself. After a few posts on the family blog it was time to migrate to my own site – introducing www.niccooks.com.  I was now able to share my blog with the world.

So, sixty posts on and how times have changed, I am celebrating with my first post dedicated to cake. YES, cake. I made my first cake.  Thanks to a good friends pregnancy cravings I have developed a sweeter tooth.  I’m still a savoury girl, but every now and then I do feel the need for something sweet.  As I was browsing the shelves of the book shop a few weeks ago a book caught my eye, the POP Bakery book.  I liked the look of the little cakes on a stick because a whole cake is still a little over facing for me, but a bite sized cake on a stick, cutely decorated as a character seemed appealing.

I got an A* in GCSE Art, so now was the time to put this qualification to the test.  I channelled my artistic energy and set about decorating.  It was a bit of a last minute decision to make the cakes, so I didn’t have all of the right decorating ingredients, but I had a good crack at.  I made pigs and tomatoes with the icing. POP Cakes are not meant to be covered in icing, the icing is a bit heavy, meaning the sticks don’t really stay. The remaining cakes were covered in chocolate and artistically drizzled with an opposing coloured chocolate.

I think I could do with a little more practice with my decorating skills, but I was pretty pleased with the overall results, and it certainly beat my Macaron efforts.  And best of all twelve months ago I would never have guessed that I would be posting about cake decorating!