A 50th birthday cake

Week 19, Bake 19.

The first weekend in May is always busy, first it is my mums birthday and then mine! So I traveled home this weekend for a big celebration as it is my mums 50th, which means that this weeks bake is a 50th celebration cake.

Ingredients:

• 340g of butter (salted)
• 340g of caster sugar
• 6 eggs
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
• 340g of self raising flour
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of milk
• a small jam jar of jam (I used strawberry)
• a lot of icing!

Method:

1. Pre-heat the oven to 180c and line 3 sandwich cake tins with baking paper.
   
2. Make sure your butter is soft and then beat it (I used a wooden spoon - and got a blister from it!), then add in the caster sugar and beat them together until light and fluffy.
3. Now beat the eggs in a jug and add them to the cake mixture, one tablespoon at a time. Beating all the time.
4. Once it is all incorporated and in the vanilla essence.
   
5. Now sift the flour and fold it into the cake mixture.
   
6. Finally gently stir in the milk.
7. Divide equally the mixture between the three tins and then bake in the oven for 17-20 minutes.
8. Once cooked, remove from the oven and allow to cool on a cooling rack.
9. Once cool assemble the cake by spreading the jam in each of the different layers.
   
10. To help the cake stand straight, use drinking straws to push into the base cake, cutting them off so that they are about 1cm, so you can push the other cake into it.
    
11. Now layer them up and it is time to ice.

I have done a very specific theme for my mum, she loves management books (!) and so I got my dad to take a picture of her library of books and then recreated the spines of them using royal icing, food colouring and my food colouring pen. I then transported them home (via London!) and thankfully they all made it safe and sound. I then made a model of my mum reading (however forgot my food colours so had to paint it with oil paints - this is not edible, but did look good.

Anyway, after a very busy week at work and then travelling 5 hours to get home and getting up at 7am to make this cake this morning, I am shattered...