How is it (mid)February 2020 already?!

Something to do, I suspect, with time speeding up as I hurtled through January in anticipation of the last weekend, when I headed up catering for our church’s annual camp. Then a blip of two weeks and suddenly Galentine’s Day was here again! What’s more, I had two other cakes to finish last week for different events, so it’s definitely been a busy patch of caking/baking/stressing. Finally I’ve got time to put my feet up… and sort through the delightful photos!!

Our theme this year was ‘pink and gold’, and as you can see my co-conspirator E did an amazing job decorating our church’s office space to suit. For our party games we chose ‘find someone who…’-bingo (a favourite from previous G-Days), and a minute-to-win-it game of my own devising(!) called ‘tower of love hearts’ where teams would take turns stacking candy hearts in hope of having the tallest tower after a minute.

In keeping with the theme, I made a pink and gold cake, passionfruit flavour with raspberry and vanilla SMBC icing. Those spheres are made from coloured or dusted white chocolate (instructions later on!) and the extra ones displayed in the bowl and E’s ferris wheel also contain chocolate mousse 😉 I couldn’t believe how quickly they were eaten up, will definitely make more next time! E made our delightful heart meringues and a lovely GF chocolate brownie, plus we had cheese and veggie platters and homemade sausage rolls to round out the savoury options.

For ‘optional activities’ in between games and eating, E taught paper ornament heart-making to our lovely guests, and my nail polish was everpresent on the outdoor table for a little bit of lux.

Now that we are old hands at planning a fabulous party for Galentine’s Day {our fourth year!} we felt we put in less effort/were less prepared than ever before, but I also felt less worried ahead of time due to the busyness of the week beforehand. Probably for the best!! We love to do this every year for our special gal pals and as a way of welcoming new ladies to Cornerstone church at the start of each year.

Now for a bit of cake ‘how-to‘…

• I used approximately one and a half recipe quantities of SMBC to fill, mask and decorate this cake, which was a passionfruit vanilla cake (made with this fave recipe with the addition of 1/2 cup passionfruit sauce and baked in two 9″ round tins). I added some passionfruit sauce to the SMBC that I used for the filling also.
• For the crumb coat/masking, I filled in all the gaps in the side of the cake so that it was a smooth canvas for the top coat.
• I added freeze-dried raspberry powder to the SMBC used for the strokes of icing around the base of the cake, which were applied with a wide palette knife
• For the drip, I coloured white chocolate and cream (approx 2.5:1 ratio) with a little yellow gel colouring, waited for it to cool (around 30 minutes) then poured it into a dropper bottle to apply around the top edge of the cake. Once all the drips were added, I filled in the top of the cake by pouring ganache in the centre and spreading it to the edge with a small palette knife. It helps to have a really cold cake when applying drips so that they stop at different heights down the cake, and before condensation appears on the SMBC (which makes the drips slide off the cake!)
• For the white chocolate spheres decoration, I used a blow torch(!!) to melt sections off of some spheres then tidied their edges while still hot with a sharp knife. I placed the spheres on top of a cake dummy to work out the position before ganaching the cake. When the ganache was nearly set, I put the spheres in place on the cake.

And as promised, here’s how those glossy white chocolate spheres came to be:

1. For gold spheres, dust silicon half-sphere cavities with lustre dust or glitter (I used Rolkem Deep Gold – which I love – and CK Disco Dust in ‘American Gold’), then dollop melted white chocolate (I used compound buttons) into each cavity. For pink spheres, tint melted white chocolate with a few drops of pink gel colouring.
2. Use a teaspoon to tease the chocolate up the sides of the cavity, trying not to touch the sides with the spoon itself
3. Make sure the chocolate is evenly distributed in the cavity and use a palette knife to wipe any chocolate away from the top of the mould (so your half sphere has an even edge)
4. Repeat for each cavity in your mould, then refrigerate the mould for half an hour to ensure chocolate is set
5. Carefully press chocolate half spheres out of mould and fill half of them with chocolate mousse (I used this great recipe and mixed half the mousse with berry coulis so the gold spheres had a pink centre, and the pink spheres had yellow/plain centres)
6. Pipe melted chocolate (of the matching colour) around the top edge of the mousse-filled half spheres and press a hollow half sphere on top, using your fingers or a small palette knife to wipe any excess chocolate flush with the sphere. If you have big holes at the join between the spheres (sometimes they break around the edge when removed from the mould) you can fill these in, but it’s not very noticable especially if you place them in pretty cupcake cases – or a ferris wheel holder!

That concludes G-Day festivities for another year, and the count-down begins for the next one – being our fifth it will quite possibly have an even more fabulous edge than ever before. And I’ve somehow been given the reigns to choose the theme for it… any suggestions?! Something that can be girly enough but still different to before, hope you can help me choose! I’ll leave you with a lovely photo taken by one of our delightful attendees, a colleague of E’s…