We have a lot of summer birthdays in our family and L’s recent seventh birthday was the latest in the string. I had thought that my days in the icing sugar cloud of despair were over, but L was having a jewellery-making party and had set her heart on the jewellery box cake she found in Debbie Brown’s erroneously-named book, 50 Easy Party Cakes.

I really must hide that book. The cakes look so pretty, so appealingly colourful, smooth and neat. I have other books of party cakes for kids, but my children never give a second glance to their swirling swathes of buttercream icing and multicoloured sprinkles. They are drawn irresistibly by the bewitching charms of Debbie Brown’s cakes with their pretty fondant models and magical themes.

If only they really were so easy to make. Debbie Brown’s cakes never seem to have crumbs poking out through the joins in the icing or stray nailprint stabs from a moment’s lapse in concentration. Her sugar glue apparently never runs and her silver dragees stay irritatingly in place, stuck shinily to the cake rather than slipping around in her fingers. Her fondant models never droop and the covering on her cakes never sags. She gives you all the information you need in the book to be able to reproduce her cakes at home, except for that vital witch’s spell that tames the recalcitrant ingredients.

I have found a way through this over the years. I have learned not to give up when the fondant icing first sticks to the worktop and the smooth surfaces give way to impressions from my clumsy fingers and thumbs. I keep going even when the details are lost in a fog of icing sugar, when the straight edges are all bumpy and when the whole cursed thing seems to have become an irretrievable disaster.

I carry on regardless until the cake is finished and then I close the book and walk away.

Perhaps this is the point at which the charms begin their work for when I return, I invariably find that it hasn’t been such a disastrous endeavour after all.

My cake might not be as perfect as the images in the book …

… but the excited appreciation of my children somehow transforms my terminally flawed efforts into the most beautiful party creation …

… and crowning birthday glory.

Happy birthday, L – and thank you to Mark for calmly photographing my work in the depths of the icing sugar cloud of despair!

When Rose came to stay, I confessed to her that I’d never dared to make a genoise. I could swear that her eyes lit up with delight as she whipped out some Wondra.

“I’ll show you how,” she said. “It’s easy.”

The lemon genoise that Rose made that day in my kitchen was one of the most perfectly moist and tender cakes that I have ever tasted. It floated softly like a cloud before melting on my tongue into waves of syrupy lemon sea. And although the recipe as a whole had seemed dauntingly complicated, Rose’s patient explanation of each step showed me that I really had nothing to fear from such an infamous undertaking.

I waited awhile before making a genoise entirely on my own, however. Although each step in itself now seemed to be quite manageable, my three little kitchen helpers added an extra layer of complexity that I wasn’t sure would be entirely beneficial to the proceedings. Finally, one morning last week when only my two-year-old T was with me at home, I plucked up the courage.

I was spurred on partly by the packet of Carr’s Sauce Flour that was sitting in my flour cupboard. I was curious to discover whether or not it would perform similarly to Wondra flour, a product that is unavailable in the UK.

Rose introduced Wondra to the genoise-making public in her presentation on flour to the Experimental Cuisine Collective at New York University in 2008 (see the third and fourth parts). Marketed as a ‘quick mix wonder’ for thickening sauces and gravies, Wondra is manufactured by a process called agglomeration. This involves hydrating or wetting the flour to form clusters among the particles. These large, agglomerated clusters are then spray-dried to produce uniform particles that flow freely, like salt or sugar. The resulting ‘instantized’ flour dipserses easily and quickly in water. This is because the larger particles are able to overcome the natural surface tension of water better than the finer particles of non-instantized flour (which is also why regular flour tends to forms lumps that are wet on the outside but remain dry on the inside when added to water).

Rose found that this enhanced dispersibility of Wondra was particularly useful when used in a genoise – the flour particles mixed easily and quickly with the batter, which helped to avoid overstirring and deflation of the whisked eggs.

As I said earlier, we can’t get Wondra in the UK. We can get a flour that is similarly marketed as being ‘thickeningly easy’ in sauce and gravy-making, however – Carr’s Sauce flour.

It’s not quite the same. It isn’t bleached, for a start. Or agglomerated (unless they’re just not admitting to that bit). Apparently, it’s made from “wheats that by nature do not form glutinous lumps with the addition of liquids.”

It doesn’t really look the same as Wondra, either. It doesn’t flow freely but behaves like regular flour in the packet and on the spoon. It’s also whiter.

It does disperse easily in water, however … and also in genoise cake batters.

I’m a shockingly inexperienced genoise-baker, but I can certainly confirm that the texture and taste of the orange whisky genoise I made last week with Carr’s Sauce flour were at least as good as I remember them being when Rose made her genoise with Wondra flour. If my own cake didn’t rise quite so high as it should have done, it was purely because about a third of the batter ended up all over T, my little kitchen helper!

I have some Wondra left over from Rose’s visit, so perhaps I will attempt a direct comparison one day soon. For now, I’m happy in the knowledge that I can ‘face my fear and do it anyway’ 😉 .

Update June 2012: detailed photos on how to make a Rainbow Cake are here.

Update April 2010: the activities and games I planned for M’s party are described in a separate post here.

At the end of her birthday party last year, M announced that she would be having a unicorn party for her next birthday. I didn’t realise that she was absolutely serious about this. I thought, “It’s a whole year away – she’s bound to change her mind.” But no, for a whole year M has stuck to her original intention and has been counting down the days until her unicorn party. 

You could argue that I’ve had a whole year to prepare, so why the sudden rush to get everything ready last week? Well, M may have had a solidly clear idea of the grand theme for her party, but she left the finer details entirely up to me. Not wanting to disappoint, I threw myself into turning our house into an enchanted forest in the hope that any passing unicorns might be tempted to pop in on the big day. We made glittery trees and rainbow streamers while M’s big sister created a welcoming poster for the front door.

Last year, M set her heart on a cake she saw in a book by Debbie Brown (here’s a warning to parents – only ever let your children see pictures of cakes that you’re happy to make yourself). Four being so much more grownupperer than three, M has now thankfully entered the chocolate frosting and smarties stage. I’m not so very far removed from the icing sugar cloud of despair that I miss those fondant modelling sessions yet … I’m quite happy to be doing chocolate and smarties.

I couldn’t resist giving the birthday girl a little surprise, though. From the outside, M’s cake looked perfectly normal (in a homemade sort of way) – a magical plastic unicorn standing amid swirls of white chocolate buttercream and scattered smarties. M’s seven little party guests looked on dutifully as M blew out her candles and I took a knife to cut into the cake.

Hesitating before plunging in to make the first slice, I asked them all, “Do you know what happens when a unicorn stands on top of a birthday cake?”

“No,” they whispered with wide eyes.

“He makes a rainbow,” I told them, cutting into the cake.

“Wow!”

The next day, M sidled up to me and asked, “Mummy, how did the unicorn do that to my cake?”

Well, if there’s by any chance anyone left in the blogosphere who hasn’t come across a rainbow cake before now, I’ll explain my own take on the concept … just in case a unicorn happens to pass by and stand on another little girl’s birthday cake 😉 .

I’m not sure who had the original idea – there’s a box-mix version doing the rounds that appears to have started with this thread in the dubiously-named ‘Something Awful’ forums. Rejecting the layered box-mix and diet soda variety however, I based my own rainbow cake recipe on Farida’s beautiful Zebra Cake (stay tuned for more from Farida in an upcoming post).

I followed Farida’s instructions to make a yellow cake batter (whichever basic cake recipe you choose, it’s important that it’s one in which the batter doesn’t mix about too much during baking or you’ll end up with a muddy brown cake instead of a rainbow). Then, instead of dividing it into two parts and colouring one part with cocoa as Farida did, I divided the mixture between seven bowls (roughly 4 tablespoons of batter in each) and used my fondant paste dyes to colour each portion a different colour of the rainbow.

I then poured each rainbow batter in turn (starting with red) into the centre of my prepared cake pan. As Farida says, don’t wait for each colour to spread out before starting with the next – just pour the batter into the centre of the pan, then pour the next colour right on top and then the colour after that without waiting for each to spread fully. The weight of each batter pushes the previous colour out further and, as long as you keep a steady hand with the pouring, they all sort themselves out.

And it’s as simple as that.

I found out in the school playground this morning that one of the guests has kept her special piece of rainbow cake carefully wrapped up since the party so that she can show it to everyone who visits.

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