Gloverly Cupcakes

I had my parents coming to visit this weekend as well as a few other friends popping over to visit, so this weeks Bake Off technical challenge was perfect, it meant that I had a yummy cake to offer everyone! I make quite a lot of fruit cakes, so I was keen to try this recipe to see how it compares. I have made my own marzipan a few times, but I have never made my own sugar paste, so this would be another thing to tick off the list.

The recipe for the Tennis Cake can be found here. The fruit cake was very straight forward to make, there was only step in the instructions that was a bit misleading, step 3 says to add the flour and ground almonds, but as far as I could see the ground almonds were for the marzipan and there weren’t any ground almonds in the cake mixture – just blanched almonds. The cake baked really well, it took 30 mins longer, but probably due to my oven being a little bit cooler.

The marzipan was easy enough to make too and tasted pretty good. The sugar paste was a lot of hard work though! I am glad I gave it a go, but I don’t think I will make it again, the shop bought stuff is much more convenient and cheaper. It was a lot of effort! I also found that I didn’t use all the icing sugar, the paste got to the point where it was the right texture and I couldn’t get any more of the icing sugar into the paste.

Having been on a couple of cake decorating course and learned a bit about royal icing, I was surprised by the huge quantity of royal icing that the recipe made and I decided to estimate how much I needed. I always end up making too much and it just gets thrown away. I made a fraction of the recipe and there was still quite a lot of waste. I piped my tennis rackets and nets onto a small sheet of perspex, which I lightly rubbed some vegetable fat over – so the pieces would lift off easily once they were dry.

The cake was very quick to assemble once all the individual bits had been made. It cut beautifully and tasted really moist and fruity. I will definitely be making the recipe again – but may be not the decorations. We ate the cake on Saturday and Sunday afternoon – it seemed very appropriate to be eating it with the Davis Cup Tennis on!