Layers of vanilla sponges, stacked into a tree and filled with strawberry jam and green vanilla buttercream. Then covered with more green vanilla buttercream and mini baubles.
Last Christmas I was gifted a tree cake mould, along with a packet of icing baubles. I only just got round to making it now, but I didn't want to wait until this Christmas to be able to make it. Now, from the photos you can probably tell that it didn’t go too well. The thing about baking is that you won’t always make things perfect or the way you want them to turn out. But when people share their baking, you only ever see people’s good attempts, they don’t share it when it goes bad. So, I wanted to do that with this one. This was my first attempt at making the tree cake and when I make it again I know I will be able to do better, as I learnt so much from my mistakes when making it.
The true difficulty with this cake is the mould itself. It came with a list of instructions, and let me tell you, I now know how bakers on The Great British Bake Off feel when they are doing the technical challenge and the instructions they are given are really brief. The instructions say to put the cake mixture into the moulds and bake them, and to keep in mind that because they are all different sizes they will cook to different times. That part makes sense, however, it doesn’t tell you how long to actually bake them for. Luckily, I had a rough idea of how long to do them for, but it would be so much more helpful and less stressful if it did tell you the times.
Although, baking may have seemed the hardest part, it wasn’t. The day I decided to bake this turned out to be a really hot day so the buttercream I made started to split. The butter was just far too soft, so the buttercream was quite runny and as you can see in the photo, no amount of green food colouring would be able to hide the melted butter streaks (though I tried to convince myself it looked somewhat like snow on the tree!). You can also see because it was runny and the weather was so hot, the layers of cake did start to slip off slightly. So, with all that happening, it may have not looked very good, but I have to say the cake did actually taste good.
So, there you go, you get to witness my rather embarrassing attempt at the tree cake. I’m sure my next attempt will be much better.
Difficulty rating: 5/10
Comments