Open Bible Birthday Cake.

For those who know me, know that I love to cook. And putting all pride aside, I'm pretty good at it. I'm not a gourmet cook by choice because my whole passion is to see people back in the kitchen cooking good old fashioned home cooked fare - minus all the preservatives and additives (well at least less of them). I love cooking from scratch and trying new recipe's and then sharing them. I have my own FB page called, 'The Salmela Family Kitchen' where you can find all the variety of things I cook. I don't post random recipe's - you will only find what I have cooked and a photo of it, so that you know they are all tried and tested! Of course those that fail don't end up there - and yes there are times that this happens.

I have been cooking for many years but what I have discovered is a liking for decorating cakes - both large and cupcakes. This is something I have only just tried in recent months so I am well and truly a novice at it. But I soon found out that the only way to learn is to practice!! Cake decorating isn't as easy as it sounds, nor is it as hard when you know how! I haven't done any courses - yet - though it is something that I would love to do one day when I have the time.

It was my husband's birthday on Sunday and he also happens to share it with our Senior Pastor Paul (we are his associate Pastors). So when Paul's lovely wife Leisa buzzed me to say she was going to organize a cake to have at church, I asked her if I could have a go at making one. This was a great opportunity for me to start practicing and I already had an idea that I wanted to do an 'open bible cake.' I thought it was probably a good cake to start with, not to complicated yet challenging enough for me to learn.

So here is my open bible cake. It was challenging and there are definitely things I learnt along the way. I made my own dark chocolate mud cake and gosh it was to die for!! Well perhaps not die, no-one technically wants to do that over a cake (as my Asperger son would point out), but it was so decadent, moist and dense that it was just a mouthful of chocolate heaven.

I cooked 4 separate cakes in silver trays which did take quite some time because they were so big that I had to cook them all separately (see my FB page for the cake recipe). I then had to cool them completely before I could handle them, which was still a bit tricky as they were quite fragile. I found that the best thing to do was to put them together, with dark chocolate ganache in the middle, cut it to the basic shape I needed and pop them in the freezer.

Once I was ready to decorate the cake, I took it out of the freezer and put it together, trimming a little more. I did find it easier cutting when frozen and will definitely do that next time. I then covered the cake in butter cream which allows the fondant to grab hold of the cake better. Because the cake was frozen the butter cream held very well.

Rolling out the fondant and getting it on in one piece was rather tricky. My mistake here was I probably didn't knead the fondant enough. I did have a few cracks but I had some ideas on how to cover it up so I did the best I could. Once the fondant was on, I used a shaping tool to make lines around the cake to look like pages.

 Now the fun part began! I used a sugar glue (which is just water and a piece of fondant in a small container) and wet around the edges of the pages. I then painted on gold glitter which I bought from a cake shop and coloured some fondant to make a book mark. I also bought some chocolate flavoured fondant which I placed around the cake to make it look like the leather binding of the bible.

The best part was definitely decorating the cake. I already had the sugar flowers from previous cupcakes I had decorated and I used them to 'hide' some of the cracks that happened when I placed the fondant on. I bought some chocolate writing tubes and wrote a favourite scripture for both Paul and Marko. Writing on a cake was very tricky, so I was quite happy with my first attempt. This is going to take a lot of practice!!

Here is my finished product. Oh I know it wasn't perfect (and I'm a perfectionist so this was hard on me), however I was proud of how it came out. Not only that, but I did this cake in between a trip to Melbourne on Friday night (3 hrs each way) and a wedding on Saturday!

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Here is the cake after we cut it. It was extremely rich and decadent and was very much enjoyed by our congregation. There was even enough for both us families to take home, though it didn't last long. I'm not a sweet tooth per se, but I did enjoy this with a cuppa. Mind you, I shall not be eating sugar for the rest of the week as I think I have consumed a month's worth!!