Let Them Eat Cake

Baking has grown massively in popularity in recent years thanks in no small part to the advent of the Great British Bake Off. This has led to people staging their own bake offs around the country, the rise of baking sites such as BakingMad.com spearheaded by Eric Lanlard and events such as The Cake and Bake Show in both Manchester and London that showcase to best in British baking.

The GBBO's James and Ryan

 

Walking around the packed Manchester Central at the 2013 Cake and Bake Show you can’t help but be awed by the impact that baking has had on us all. Baking trends have also become a lot more prominent, indeed you can hardly move for all the cupcakes. 

Tom Herbert's Masterclass at the The Cake and Bake Show Manchester

America have paved the way for the next baking trend that started it’s across the pond in 2012: Cake Pops. For those of you who are unsure what these little beauties are, think of a cake lollipop. 

More recently a trend that has been grabbing my attention is the cake push pop. This idea is very much like the ice cream push pop that swept the nation in the nineties but the cake push pop is less likely to give you a brain freeze. 

On the quest to try and make my very own cake push pops I enlisted my mother to help me trawl around every shop and supermarket in search of these elusive treats. Yet the push pop proved to be a bit too retro for most places and our search was fruitless until we stumbled across the Smarties ice cream of the exact description of what I was looking for in the bus station of all places. 

For the cake push pop to work best the plastic encasing should be see through, something that that push pop that I had was not. I had hoped that the blue card around the plastic case would come off leaving a clear shell but I was sadly mistaken so I was forced to abandon ship. I later learnt that I can order the case exact to my specifications off the internet. What a numpty. 

The popularity of baked goods has influenced many areas of life such as the media and even fashion.  Cake has recently taken a starring role in some photo-shoots and not just as a form of sustenance to keep the photographer, stylists and models going after a working day. This blog is a great example of cake being used to accentuate the models look. http://www.celebrationgeneration.com/blog/2010/05/03/fashion-and-cake/

At Accent Clothing (@AccentClothing) bright colours, high fashion and of course cake were the inspiration for the May look book shoot. (Baking done by yours truly)To achieve the brightness required I went through many bottles of food colouring but nothing seemed to be working, the colours weren’t vibrant enough and the cakes just tasted like the food colouring. This problem was resolved when I met colour pastes; I would only need a toothpick of the colour and not only were the cakes the right colour but also everything that I touched ended up stained.  

One of the most challenging tasks that I faced was not the making of the cakes or even the decorating of it (although that was hard) but trying to transport rainbow cupcakes and funky coloured cake pops in one piece. As I let out a sigh of relief when I delivered the cake and nothing had broken I felt like a proud mama. The cake craze is here to stay and I for one am delighted.