My Colourful Pinata Cake Recipe

Junior Bake Off 2015 is on this week on CBBC and I love watching both GBBO and Junior Bake Off.

In the first episode of Junior Bake Off this year they had to make a Pinata cake for the showstopper challenge and I decided I wanted to make one too.

My little sister wanted to help me and it was a very busy evening to get it all done.

To make the cakes, I used the usual vanilla sponge recipe I use but timesed the amount by 4 to make 4 cakes. My sister cracked the eggs to put in and I think she lost count so I don't remember her using 8 so I think it had fewer eggs in than it should have but it seemed to work out ok.

How many eggs did you put in Miss T? Not sure!

Ingredients:
480g self-raising flour
4 tsp vanilla extract
2 tsp baking powder
8 eggs
480g caster sugar
480g stork
tiny splash of milk
4 different colours of food colouring (I used red, pink, green and blue sugar flair colours)
Sweets for the middle

For the buttercream:
600g icing sugar
300g butter
1 tsp vanilla extract
Sprinkles to decorate

You will also need 4 cake tins that are 8 inches in size. I only had 2 that size and 1 bigger one so I re-used one of the tins after taking the cake out and I trimmed the larger cake to the right size.

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease and line the cake tins with baking paper.
2. This is an all-in-one cake mix so I literally mixed all the ingredients together in a mixer.
3. Then I split the mixture evenly between 4 bowls and mixed in a different colour food colouring in each.
4. Then it was time to bake them. They took about 20 minutes each to bake. I checked with a skewer to see if they were ready.
5. I made the buttercream by mixing together the butter, icing sugar and vanilla extract.
6. When the cakes were all cool I started to put them together. I cut out a circle from the middle of the blue and the pink layers.  First I put the green layer at the bottom which was the biggest, then buttercream, then the pink layer with the hole in, then more buttercream, then the blue cake with the hole in.
7. At this stage I filled the hole with sweets. I used smarties, revels and M&Ms.
8. Another layer of buttercream and then the red cake (no hole in this!) on top.
9. I put buttercream over the whole cake and decorated with some sprinkles. Then we had to wait until the next day to eat it because my sister had gone to bed by then.

It was such a cool, pretty, fun cake and the pinata cascade of sweets worked. My family thought it was amazing and they thought it tasted good too.

Even the crumbs looked pretty!

Badgers and Baking - My amazing day with Sky Badger and The Boy who Bakes!

Image courtesy of Sky Badger

Once upon a time in a fantasy world I met the one and only legendary Edd kimber at my school. Except it turned out not to be a fantasy. It really did happen. Here's how...

My little sister suffers from arthritis which makes me very sad. So my mum was looking up information about wheelchairs and she came across the Sky Badger website. And guess what? They had a baking competition!

You had to bake a 'free from' recipe so I invented some fruity muffins which had three types of fruit to make them sweet so they didn't need any sugar.

Then something amazing happened, we got an email from Sky Badger and my recipe won first prize! You can see my recipe and the runners up here.

Image courtesy of Sky Badger

The prize was for Edd kimber to visit my school and bake with me and my whole year group!!! It was fandabadozi!

Edd kimber was actually very fun because he kept making cooking jokes. He was really nice to all of us and if we made any little mistakes he corrected it kindly and gave us tips for next time. He also asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up and I said either a chef or an artist because I love drawing cartoon pictures.

Image courtesy of Sky Badger

We ended the day with a giant cake stall selling everything we cooked. It sold out in minutes! The money raised was split between the Sky Badger charity and the refugee crisis.

I also got to meet Naomi from sky badger and we used Baking Mad ingredients like Allinson flour and Billingtons sugar for baking with which was really kind of them.

It was a fabulous day and I couldn't have been happier.

P.S. My little sister came to buy a cake at the cake sale and she loved the cakes we made!

P.P.S My school were really cool to change all our lessons for the day so we got to do baking and baking themed stuff all day! I wish we did baking everyday!

Waitrose Cookery School in Salisbury

Last week I went on holiday from Monday to Friday. Then on Friday afternoon we went to Salisbury so I could do Waitrose cookery school in Salisbury.

Last year I went to Waitrose Cookery school in London and I look so young then in the photos. This time it wasn't a family course it was just for children. Claire, who used to be in London is the head chef here. But she wasn't there on Friday. It was Sarah who did my course.

Ready to start!

 I spotted all these Kenwood K Mix stand mixers like the yellow one I won when I won at the BBC Good Food Bakes and Cakes show when I met Eric Lanlard and got to have afternoon tea with Mary Berry. 

I also spotted this cookery book which I already have because my mum and dad got it signed for me by Sabrina Ghayour when they went to her supper club in London last year. I like this cookery book because it has Iranian recipes and I'm a quarter Iranian because my granny was Iranian but I never met her.

 I made a Summer berry pudding which tasted really nice and I also made Pea and Ricotta tarts. I really enjoyed mixing together the ingredients for the tart as I'd like to make it again and try different vegetables in there.

Overall I really really really enjoyed it!