This was a request from my brother-in-law, as I was invited to his birthday dinner, I thought I should offer to bring something.

For those of you who are not familiar with Pandan (pronounced “pun done”), it’s a very common type of plant found everywhere in South East Asian countries. (English name is Screwpine leaf).

What they do is take the leave, chop it up into small pieces, chuck into the food processor with some water, then filtered out to get the juice, which is a vibrant green colour.

Of course, in NZ, where the climate is very different, it’s hard to find these leaves, so some have imported them as frozen leaves and they can be found at many South East Asian food stores.

Another way of making these is with a simple addition of “Pandan Paste”, which is a very thick pandan extract that comes in a small essence bottle, and with only 1 table spoon of this thick extract gives the cake an extremely bright colour already!

Here’s the well-received Pandan Cake, my first attempt, too! Very proud

As the cake itself came out beautifully, I thought it best not to overwhelm it with decorations, so I only did a simple whipped-cream border.

It WAS the last week of the term, in fact, last day, so I wasn’t swamped with work and could manage whipping up a cake (I really must practise getting up to speed a bit, this cake still took me half a day!)

She requested a 10-inch chocolate brownie cake with buttercream icing, and of course, Scooby-Doo on top.

So here it is! (by the way Caiden loves yellow)

Since then I had been busying with end-of-term businesses at the school, as well as being newly engaged I was excitedly planning my still-a-while-to-go wedding!

Anyway, my flatmate (also a music teacher) was having a house concert nearing the end of the term, and asked if I could make her some music-themed cupcakes for the kids. She asked for a basic chocolate cupcake, and here’s what I came up with! I thought these were cute

Having met and chat with him on several occasions, also with my partner constantly telling me what Duncan has done this time (I promise it’s all good things!) I thought the least I could do was make him a big-ass farewell cake for his leaving party at work on Thursday.

I suppose I could make it even bigger, but he did say there will probably be around 3 to 30 people, and it will be brought into work, so I thought 12-inch x 16-inch is big enough, surely?

Since he’s leaving NZ to Australia, we thought it’d be funny to be geographically incorrect

It would typically serve 60-80 people, but I am proud to say that this cake was gone in 12 hours with 30 people! (there was about 2/5 left in the fridge from Thursday evening and by Friday evening it slowly chipped away until it was all gone)

Do you get the joke?

When I first started at the market at the beginning of the year, I had gone through lots of trouble. Finding a registered kitchen to bake at, getting the health and hygiene licence, lots of money spent on getting all the equipment for transport, display etc.

It was with great promise when I started this market! But unfortunately things didn’t work out, mainly due to the fact that this market was underground, and in Wellington (where the weather is unstable) and possibly I started at the wrong time too – winter markets are never really that popular.

I’ve had some good days, of course, but with all the kitchen hire cost and the stall hire etc., at the end of this path (almost 1 year in), I have made almost nothing, not even repeat customers due to the fact it’s a weekly market where tourists come and go.

Of course it’s not all about money, but at the end of the day, I had to decide that standing there for 8 hours every Saturday to give away free cake is not the best option for someone like me.

So unfortunately I ended up having to put a stop to it, and will concentrate on custom-made orders instead.

Now, on to bigger and better things!

My good friend’s brother suddenly messaged me on google+ a while back, asking if I was still making cakes?

It was derived from the fact that I had just picked up a full-time relieving job at a high school and had announced that I had no time for market anymore, so I had put a stop to the market until the school holidays.

I of course replied yes, I am still making cakes to order. He immediately asked me if I could make a birthday cake for his wife as a surprise? What a lovely gesture, and surely I said yes. After a few (QUITE a few!) messaging back and forth with him on google+ what kind of cake he wants, even though I gave him a few choices, he was very keen on having a banana chocolate cake. At the end of our conversation, I asked him when he needs it, and he replied “Friday”! Gees, mister, it’s already Wednesday, that’s a bit late!

Nonetheless, it’s not a cartoon cake, so no elaborate 8-hour pipe-work required, so I managed to get it done in time!

This was his 10-inch banana chocolate cake, he said they all loved it so I will take his word for it!

The birthday boy is apparently very particular about his T-Rex, which must have a red head, yellow body, pink and purple hands and feet. This made for a very colourful combination! I made my own decision to change the back of the dinosaur to red and the front to yellow, so as not to have a clashy “cut-off” line between the red head and the yellow body. Fortunately the boy was happy with it!

Personally I liked the multi-coloured border

Feedback:

What a great trade, we all enjoyed the cake very much and my little boy loved the T Rex on top. Thank you.

Here’s a Trademe order of a Lalaloopsy doll cake.

The girl loves orange cakes, so I managed to make a 12″ x 8″ orange cake with orange buttercream filling and icing.

Unfortunately I made this cake in a hurry and by the time it’s done it was night time, and as it’s too big to fit in my normal cake boxes, I needed to wrap this up gently with glad wrap and didn’t manage to take a day-light photo (which I’ve now stuck to as natural-lighting makes the photo look sooo much better!)

These photos will have to do… (the side of the cake was actually basket-weaving, but the lighting wasn’t very good)

Here’s the feedback:

Absolutely fantastic cake, You did an amazing job, thank you. Highly recommend to all  

Well, they both only contain egg whites and no yolks, there!

Also I personally like the coconut version better coz it’s not sickly sweet like the ever-so-popular French macarons, and please don’t come at me with a stick coz I really don’t see what’s so amazing about the French macarons.

The coconut one is so much more flavourful, doesn’t taste like wet sugar with a crusty layer of sugar and a sugar filling.

And I like the way I’ve made them this time! I don’t know why, maybe the eggs were smaller, so the dough turned out a bit harder than I last made them, so I could actually roll them in my hands to form cute ping-pong balls, and they came out of the oven even prettier than my usual batches!

Penguins were suggested to me, and since it uses pretty much the same colours, I thought I’d give it a try.

I first started with the body and the head, and unfortunately it looked rather human-body-part.

It did take quite a long time to make it, as I had to wait until they harden before I could add more features, otherwise the penguin would collapse.

Next batch I will make the buttercream harder, and make the penguin shorter in general, with the white body patch larger.

Here’s the result!

By the way, I was pretty excited about the flavour, as it’s a coconut cupcake! It’s actually just my vanilla cupcake recipe with some tweaking, and it turned out even better than the vanilla cupcake. The coconut shreds added gave the cupcake a crispy crunchy bite, I was really excited!