Birthdays for this year are now over, one can start rebuilding the savings. 🙂

Paul’s cake 2 weeks ago was a chocolate number layered with marzipan, which I had to freeze half of, as it could not be managed by Florek himself, us girls are not mad on chocolate cakes. As a special nod to Tesla fan Florek, I cut out a Tesla logo out of marzipan, nice little effect while sitting on a shiny ganache.

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For Izzie I decided to go with a rainbow cake idea. The recipe I used was mojewypieki.com, but the end product was slightly different. First of all I realized quite late that I had no blue food colouring and having baked 6 sponges I decided to leave one out- the cake was a monster and would not fit in the fridge. For two sponges I used 4 eggs, 170 g of sugar( less than in the original recipe), 100g of plain flour and 40 g of potato flour and food colouring. Once the sponges came out of the oven ( less than 20 minutes) I dropped them gently onto the floor in their tins from about 30cm, so that the sponges were nicely even and tight when cooled.

For the filling I used 500g of mascarpone and 500 ml of double cream, all whipped with icing sugar, then some lemon juice added and some yuzu juice, which I also used to drizzle onto the sponges while building the cake. I also used a large can of pineapple for the texture and folded it through the cream.

The end result is a surprisingly light and soft cake, big, but we gave some away and then enjoyed most of it yesterday with Mariusz and Ewa. Might be attempted again, but would have to be smaller. New set of Wilton food colouring was also purchased, so next time I’ll have all the colours I need.

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Ever since I came across an organic coconut flour in Lidl, I thought I wanted to have a go at lime and coconut macaroons, but coconut was to be in the shells too. Today, after a work out with Choda in the morning I thought – today is the day! I bravely experimented with the recipe for the shells, instead of 150 g each of ground almonds and icing sugar, I did 100g of each and 100 g of coconut flour. Not a good move, it turned out. The paste was mega thick, even when added to the Italian meringue and blended for some extra time I knew there will be no joy from this experiment. Still, I decided to bake some of them. They have risen a little in the oven, but having tasted one of the first batch I dumped the whole lot in the bin, swore a lot, tidied up and after lunch I used up the left over egg yolks for creme brulees.

Then, while browsing the net looking for suggestions and ideas relating to coconut and lime macaroons, I came across some stunning photos of lime macaroons. Simple, hardly any colouring, white filling. I shut the laptop down and marched into the kitchen thinking-there will be some sodding macaroons this afternoon. I ditched the coconut, baked the shells the usual way( almost half of them cracked, damned things!) and then filled them with double cream whipped with icing sugar, lime zest and lots of lime juice. Some of the good looking ones I froze for Izzie’s birthday bash in 2 weeks time. I’m munching on them this evening thinking that they don’t need the coconut. But what if I had some Malibu?……