I confess I stuck to the original recipe ingredients to see if I could speed up the time it takes to prepare. Not that its a difficult or a time consuming cake to make it’s just that the first step is soaking the fruit overnight in the fridge and this is hurry up cakes.com after all )

There are numerous versions of this cake around and all seem to be popular so I used the one I thought most versatile.

At its simplest this cake could be prepared if you got unexpected visitors with the bare minimal time spent away from them. It needs virtually no preparation or nannying .

So on with the ingredient list:

600ml of chocolate flavoured milk (or coffee  or banana or caramel etc.)

2 (Australian) cups of self-raising flour

only 3 simple fruit cake ingredients

1kg of mixed dried fruit

Seeing as that didn’t take up much room I’ll convert:

20 fl. oz.of chocolate flavoured milk (or coffee  or banana or caramel etc.)

2  cups of self-rising flour + a rounded tablespoon to round up to an Aussie cup size

2.3 lb of mixed dried fruit

On to the method.

The original recipe tells you to mix the milk and fruit together and leave in the refrigerator overnight. The next day you sift the flour into the soaking fruit and mix well. Then you put the mixture into the tin and bake. The emphasis is on the soaking over night. The most important step.

Heh. I wanted to see if it could be made quicker than that and it can.

In a lot of the traditional fruit cake recipes I use soaking the fruit, in say tea or juice, is quite common. Again using the soak over-night method but what I’ve found is adding the fruit to the liquid and gently warming it until its just hot, then letting it sit and cool for a short while does the job just about the same.

So I thought I’d try this with the flavoured milk.

Now if you are following my instructions to replicate exactly what I did you will need to add the milk and fruit to a pan and warm gently.

Then you forget to turn down the heat and walk away for a minute while you wait for it to heat up.  You check twitter and get distracted until you hear the sound of boiling milk setting itself firmly to your stove-top ;o)

Spilt chocolate milk

Did you know that bringing flavoured milk to a rapid boil encourages it to split into watery liquid and gloopy clusters of lumps? Well you do now.

So this was turning into a boiled-fruitcake kind of recipe and that isn’t what we wanted, so I guesstimated how much liquid I’d lost and added an equal quantity of normal moo juice.

An after thought was to only warm the fruit in half the milk and keep the second half chilled. Then after warming you could add the chilled milk to make the whole thing cool down quicker.

If anyone tries this please let me know how it goes.

I decided to not wait until the liquid was cold, or in fact cool and added the flour when it had lost most of its “hotness”. I think this made for more difficult mixing but I really need to build my upper body strength back up and stop sounding like a wuss :p

This does make a large volume of mixture so it does take some mixing. I greased and lined (in my own imprecise manner) a spring-form tin 22cm in diam. and 6cm deep that’s roughly 9in by 2½  in in old money.

I had previously preheated the oven to 180°C aka 350°F and popped it in there. I initially decided to bake for 45mins (didn’t go with the original recipe here as most seemed to bake in a loaf tin so the timing would be off, incidentally the reason I didn’t go loaf shaped is I felt that it has too much fruit to make slicing it awkward) and our lousy oven dictates turning round the food halfway through baking so 25 minutes in I went to turn it round and found it had over-colored, in fact almost burnt on top already so I covered with foil and turned the oven down slightly. After 45 mins it probably could of come out but I left it for an hour total because I’d reduced the heat earlier. The skewer came out clean and I took it out of the oven and let it cool in the tin.

Here she is:

The finished quick and easy fruit cake

Its a very dense, fruit-rich cake. It is delicious in itself but I like spice with my fruit so I would probably

add some mixed spice next time I make it. I would also recommend using mixed fruit which has the candied peel included as this certainly added something to the cake in my opinion.

If you wanted to make this cake more special, or to have at Christmas if your usual cake runs out I’d add a bit of booze (whiskey,rum, brandy etc) Just a couple of spoonfulls and some chopped nuts, say substitute a few teaspoons of fruit with the chopped nuts. You could also mess around with the types of fruit in there.

You could make up your own flavoured milk from a powder or cocoa as long as its sweet or sweetened.

I don’t think the cake could handle full on Christmas style icing but could certainly handle something simple. I’m not sure how long the cake will keep as I only made it a couple of days ago. Because it lacks a lot of the traditional ingredients that help it’s storage life I would recommend eating it as soon as possible. It is a large cake and I will be making a half-mixture next time.

One suggestion is to cook the cake in a square tin and cut in to 4 after it has cooled, drizzle with a glaze or light icing and give away to hosts of your holiday gatherings. They will think you’ve spent hours (and a fortune) making it.

So there she is, what I consider the easiest, quickest and simplest(and possibly the most versatile) fruitcake to make

So easy it's almost a cheats fruitcake

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SAM: Two-thirds of the pennies produced in the last 30 years have dropped out of circulation.

JOSH: No, it’s not.

The above excerpt from an episode of The West Wing is, I’m afraid, an accurate description of this blog post. I’ve done a lot of research on a tiny little unimportant topic and now I’m going to tell you about it.

And you will be well within the bounds of sanity to tell me it’s not interesting.

But that’s not going to stop me from posting.

———-

This is or isn't what a traditional Festivus Cake looks like.

It all began when someone on twitter mentioned an article she’d written on the commercialization of Festivus. As I read this article, I could only think, “hey, I wonder if there’s a Festivus cake?” (my apologies to the article’s author). It’s a good article to read if you don’t know the origins of Festivus (although that’s unlikely if you’ve come in search of Festivus Cake instruction — which I promise to eventually provide in this article).

Following the accepted first step of all contemporary research, I googled “festivus cake” and after a brief foray into silliness, I ended up at that veritable font of all knowledge, Wikipedia. Where I found this (emphasis mine):

The original holiday dinner in the O’Keefe household featured turkey or ham followed by a Pepperidge Farm cake decorated with M&M’s, as described in detail in O’Keefe’s The Real Festivus.

Score! This is going to be the easiest blog entry, ever!

Gleefully driving to the grocery store to pick up my Pepperidge Farm cake (it’s a frozen, pre-made cake) and a bag of M&Ms, I could only imagine that this is what it feels like to be Sandra Lee.

As I drove, I also considered that I had no clue what sort of pattern is used for the M&M decorations and I resolved to look that up when I returned home.

That’s one thought I wish I’d never had.

Back at home (with my pre-made cake and bag of candy), and armed with the name of an original source (see above wikipedia quote), I immediately zipped off to Amazon to have The Real Festivus book overnighted to me. Imagine my surprise to discover that not only is the book out of print, the price of a used copy starts at $97.95. You have got to be kidding me.

Hoping to get lucky, I resorted to a quick search of Amazon’s “Look Inside Me” — which gave me precisely zero results for “cake”. Alright, back to Google.

So-called Festivus Cake

The discovery of this cake is where I began to suspect a problem. Now, I’m not calling myself a Pepperidge Farm expert, but my Uncle Dave (R.I.P, Uncle Dave) worked across two states and forty-plus years for Pepperidge Farm. I have eaten my fair share of Pepperidge Farm cakes.

And not a single one of those cakes was round. Ever. Obviously, this egregious error made it clear that this picture (and the sites using it) could not inform the design of my Festivus Cake.

Back to Google. I began poring over all the pages that mention the M&M decorated Pepperidge Farm cake and I became certain of one thing: 99.9995% of them got their information from Wikipedia.

Darn you Creative Commons and your free-to-copy content, darn you to heck.

I tried to find an “official” Festivus site. I found a couple of sites that seemed “officiall-y”, but they also looked like they were created at the time the show aired (1997) and hadn’t been touched in a few years except to change relevant dates. One of those sites even had a Different Festivus Book for sale, but I had trouble pinning down how the author (Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) had come to be a Festivus “expert” and in all his writings, I found no mention of cake (meaning his book would likely be of little use to me).

With little hope, I switched to books.google.com. huzzah! I found a fully searchable, but only partially viewable copy of The Real Festivus. Hoping to suss out what I needed from “snippets”, I eagerly searched on “cake” and was served up this message:

“No results found in this book for cake“

W-wha-? But Wikipedia said the cake was “described in detail in O’Keefe’s The Real Festivus.” What sort of evil web of cakey lies is this?

And, more importantly, why on earth would anyone lie about cake?

On a whim, I searched the book for “dessert” and was served up this snippet:

My mother always cooked it, whatever it was, along with mashed potatoes, gravy, beans, and a pecan pie for dessert

Pie? PECAN PIE!?!

Crestfallen, I turned to my vast array of twitter followers (yes, I do feel it’s fair to use “vast” when describing my 199 followers, 25% of whom I’m fairly sure are bots of some sort) and asked if anyone had the book. Apparently not. But with my tweets, I managed to suck my fellow HurryUpCakes blogger, Deb into the black hole that is my Festivus Cake research.

The remaining HurryUpCakes blogger, Pix is reportedly “away” with “no computer”.

Deb happened to have a copy of the Seinfeld “Festivus Episode” (which is actually titled “The Strike” and in her dedication she watched the entire episode.

No mention of cake.

But Deb didn’t stop there, she went on to find this transcript of a 2009 chat with Dan O’Keefe (the Seinfeld writer whose father is the creator of Festivus). There was no mention of the Pepperidge Farm cake, but there was this juicy tidbit describing the author of the other Festivus book:

a little douchebag parasite who wrote a book on Festivus and set himself up as an expert because he interviewed me for the Times. I’m not typing his name so his book sales don’t spike, but in addition to having a clunky prose style, he was rude and annoying

Well that was certainly fun (and validated my opinion that there was nothing of value on that “official” looking site).

But it didn’t answer my questions about The Cake.

And this is the moment where I felt that I had exhausted my research options.

It is my guess that the Pepperidge Farm/M&Ms cake is more fictional than Festivus. Maybe it was originally part of the show and ended up on the editing room floor. Or maybe a Wikipedia gremlin decided to have a bit of fun. Or maybe the google book search is just missing the book pages that talk about the cake.

The only thing I know for sure is that I have a Golden 3-Layer Pepperidge Farm cake in my freezer and a pound of M&M candies on my kitchen counter.

Oh, and that the “easiest blog post ever” has turned into the most research heavy blog post ever.

And maybe, just maybe this is what it feels like to be Sandra Lee.

Because traditional or not, authentic or not, appropriate or not: I’m making the damn cake.

Pepperidge Farm Cake and M&Ms Candy

Pepperidge Farm Cake Straight from the box.

Carefully placing the M&M candies on the "Festivus Cake".

As to arrangement of the M&Ms, given the complete and utter lack of reliable details found on The Internet, I hereby declare that the arrangement I have chosen (as seen above) is the Official Arrangement of M&Ms on a Festivus Cake. Ignore this Official Arrangement at your own peril.

And feel free to use the comment section below to explain to me there is no “official” anything when it comes to Festivus. Except possibly the Aluminum Pole. Or, if you’re orthodox, a clock and a bag.

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Pumpkin shaped cake with buttercream frosting and fondant accents.

Pumpkin shaped cake with buttercream frosting and fondant accents.

I’m primarily a buttercream broad, but when I was designing the Dr. Horrible Party Cakes, I knew I was going to be using a lot of fondant.

I decided a pumpkin-shaped cake would be an excellent place to experiment with shaping fondant — it’s easy enough to make a lovely pumpkin cake with just buttercream frosting, but fondant is a great way to add some pumpkin leaves and curly vine details.

If I had it all to do over again, I would have rolled the fondant quite a bit thinner and I would have added some painted details to the leaves with liquid food coloring (a process I used a lot on the goggles cake).

But for a primarily buttercream broad, I was pretty satisfied with the pumpkin’s fondant accents.

Pumpkin Shaped Cake Supplies

• Enough batter for three cakes (3 standard box mixes)
• Buttercream Frosting (enough for approximately 3 cakes)
• Fondant
• Wilton’s Gel Food Coloring: Green, Orange, Yellow, Royal Blue (the Yellow and Royal Blue are optional colors)
• Pumpkin Leaf Pattern
• Toothpicks
• Specialty Pans: Bundt Pan

Using the bundt pan in ways it was not intended.

The foundation of the pumpkin-shaped cake is almost always the bundt pan. The contemporary bundt pan was originally designed for baking “bundkuchen”, a type of German coffee cake. Today the bundt pan is used for baking just about any type of cake — even pumpkin.

For the pumpkin cake, bake two bundt cakes. The size of your bundt pan will determine just how much batter is needed, but for the average pan, one box mix will do. Bake time will be considerably longer than when baking two layers from one box — close to twice as long, but start checking the cake early and make sure not to over-bake.

When I started this cake, I thought two bundt cakes were the answer for the perfect pumpkin shape.

I was wrong.

In order to keep the cake from collapsing, I knew I was going to use this stacking method and when I put the cake together, well… just look at the pics:

Looking for the perfect pumpkin cake shape.

The first picture is of two bundt cakes stacked on top of each other. I like the curved edges on the top and on the bottom, but the curves in the middle are not making me happy.

So I leveled off what would traditionally be the “bottom” of each bundt cake and put the cake back together — and that’s the second image.

I now had a more traditional pumpkin-shaped cake — a very short, kind of flat, pumpkin-shaped cake.

And this is when the third box mix comes into play. I baked two 9″ layers (the size should match the size of your bundt pan). One would be used for the stem of the pumpkin and one would be the middle layer of the pumpkin cake — and that’s the third picture.

Now that I had a shape I was happy with, it was time for the frosting.

Tip: I use disposable chopsticks as my primary source of “dowels” for stacking cakes — not your good chopsticks, but those cheapo break apart ones that always accompany takeout and splinter your lips.

Smooth buttercream frosting.

If you squeeze one batch of buttercream frosting, you can frost this entire cake, but if you apply frosting with a pastry bag and frosting tip (which tends to put the frosting on thicker), you might need 1.5 batches.

Before you add the orange coloring, set aside 1/2 cup of frosting (this will be the frosting for the stem).

I colored the frosting with Wilton’s Orange gel coloring, but because I wanted a more natural orange (and not cartoon orange), I added a tiny amount of Royal Blue. This just dulls down the orange and is a completely optional step. Once the cake is frosted, use the paper towel method to smooth the frosting.

Making grooved on side of the pumpkin cake.

Allow the smoothed frosting to “rest” for 10-15 minutes.

Place a paper towel on the frosting and gently drag the back of your finger along the cake to make the grooves of the pumpkin.

Stem made from cut out cakes circles.

Using a cookie/fondant cutter, cut circles of cake from the second 9″ layer of cake. Stack those layers (you’ll likely need to use toothpicks to stabilize the stack) and carve to your satisfaction. Make sure you don’t carve the stack so skinny that it will fall through the hole in the center of the top bundt cake.

Get the frosting you set aside earlier and color with Wilton Gel coloring (I used Kelly green). Frost the stem and then place the stem in the center of the cake — use toothpicks to hold the stem in place. Drag the tines of a standard dinner fork through the frosting to make it rough.

Pumpkin shaped cake with all buttercream frosting.

For you buttercream freaks, your work here is done! If you want some fondant extras, continue reading.

Download the pumpkin leaf pattern PDF

If you’re new to fondant, you can either purchase “rolled fondant” (ready-to-use) or make Pix’s Marshmallow fondant. They’re similar to work with, but Pix’s is reportedly yummy. Most ready-to-use fondant is… an acquired taste.

I say Pix’s is “reportedly yummy” because I’m a fondant weenie and I bought ready-to-use.

Once you have the fondant of your choice, color it green with Wilton’s Gel Coloring (check Pix’s tutorial on Coloring Fondant).

But before you do all that, download this pattern and cut out the leaf patterns.

Cutting fondant leaves.

Use the downloaded leaf patterns to create the green fondant leaves.

Fondant leaves draped over plastic containers.

To give the fondant leaves some interest, drape them over small plastic containers or bowls or whatever else you have in the kitchen that seems suitable. I used a mixture of plastic containers and chopsticks.

Fondant snakes wrapped around chopsticks.

For the pumpkin vines, roll out some snakes of fondant. I wanted some variety, so I added some Golden Yellow in varying amounts to little bits of the already green fondant. Once you have the snakes, wrap them around chopsticks, lolly sticks, or the round handle of a wooden spoon. Allow the fondant to dry for approximately 30 minutes.

Vine curls removed from chopsticks and shaped.

Once the vines have dried (but aren’t completely hardened), slide them off the chopsticks and stretch them out. You can also “bend” them so that they will fall more gracefully along the sides of the pumpkin. Allow the fondant to harden fully. If you try to drape the curls on the pumpkin too soon, the weight of the dangling fondant will stretch out the curls completely and/or cause the curls to break.

Pumpkin shaped cake with buttercream frosting and fondant accents.

Once all of your fondant pieces have dried, attach them to the cake. For the curls, I just stuck one end in the buttercream. For the leaves, I just placed them on the pumpkin and allowed them to rest naturally against the stem and sides of the pumpkin.

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Log with branch

Take store bought log cake (could use a jellyroll or chocolate like I have here) roll over and slice off about 1/6th of the bottom.

Cut bottom of cake

Cut this piece in half vertically and place on top of each other to form another branch.

Place slice to make branch

Cut a slight diagonal off one end of the branch so it fits snug against the branch and juts out like a branch

Cut a slight diagonal off one end of the log

Chocolate buttercream icing recipe

60 grams of butter at room temperature
1 tbls of milk
1 ¼ cups of chocolate icing sugar (powdered sugar)-sifted

Here in Australia this comes already mixed. If you need to make it up yourself try using 1 cup icing sugar (powdered sugar) and ¼ cup of cocoa –sifted together

Either place all ingredients in a food processor and blend until combined and fluffy, or beat with a wooden spoon to combine then finish with electric whisk.

A more luxury version of buttercream frosting can be found here but use perhaps only half the recipe

Cover with chocolate buttercream icing.

Add chocolate buttercream

Use a nice thick coating

Use a fork to mark out bark like lines on the cake.

Use fork to make bark marks

Birds nest

Melt chocolate in a bowl and break into it “Shredded wheat” type cereal and mix together well.

Shredded wheat cereal

You can use cocoa pops , rice crispies/bubbles etc or other cereal.  I just use shredded wheat because it looks more like twigs.

Grease the inside of a ramekin, bowl or mug and form a nest shape in the base. Make sure the base is nice and thick.

Form nest in dish or ramekin

Then put it in the freezer for 10 minutes to speedily set.

Remove nest from container (you may need to stand the container in warm water for 20-30 seconds to help loosen it and perhaps run a knife along the top)

Place the nest in between both branches. I raised mine a little by using the thin wedge I had sliced of in the beginning underneath.

Place nest in between branches

Add candy and/or chocolate eggs to the nest.

Place eggs in nest

The finished Easter cake-log with nest

Of course this cake was put together with speed in mind and it’s totally up to you how much time you would like to put into the decorations.

As suggestions you could add alcohol or flavouring to the cake and/or the icing. Sprinkle some coconut coloured with green food colouring around the base of the cake. Add flowers.

There we have the easy, very fast Easter cake (or spring cake )in around half an hour.

The birds nests we made make fantastic Easter gifts. Make in muffin or fairycake (cupcake) cases. Add a chick and break open one of the eggs.  Great fun for kid’s and incredibly easy.

The nest makes a great cake on it's own

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Easy Mothers day donut cake- Frangipani

The easiest Mother’s day cake is made by creating a donut cake. Very young children can make this cake quite easily, with adult supervision and it’s a great and fun way  to spend quality time with little kid’s on Mothering Sunday morning while Mom is getting a lie-in.

To make the cake you will need:

2 x 12 packs of basic donuts – we used plain supermarket ones

1 quantity of Chocolate Ganache (see here for recipe)

Your choice of decorations (****)

Take the serving platter or plate you will be using and practice with your donuts to get a good idea of how you will stack them once they are iced with the Ganache chocolate icing.

Brush excess sugar and crumbs from donut

Once you have planned your shape take the donuts one by one and brush off any excess sugar

Dip the donuts into the Ganache until half-coated with the chocolate icing.

Dip donuts in Chocolate ganache frosting

Set aside on a rack while the icing sets on the donuts.

Once the icing is set arrange on the serving platter as planned before.

The donuts will stick together better now they are iced.

Chocolate donut cake

Add your decorations of choice. Here we added pretty ribbon and some fake Frangipani flowers.

Easy mothers day cake (Frangipani donut)

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Easter Bunny Cake

There’s the super easy Classic Bunny Rabbit Cake and then there’s this “a little bit more work, but isn’t he a charmer?” Easter Bunny Cake.

You can tell he’s an Easter Bunny because he’s so darn colorful — of course, if you prefer another color (even something bizarre like “brown” or “white”), all you have to do is select the appropriate color frosting. He doesn’t even have to be an Easter Bunny Cake, he’s equally happy to serve as the “pet rabbit cake.” Although, you might want to skip the bow tie — as pet rabbit cakes don’t usually enjoy dress up as much as Easter Bunny cakes.

Download the Bunny Rabbit Pattern

Creating the Bunny Rabbit Cake

1. Whip up your favorite cake batter (I made this white cake) and evenly divide the batter between one 9″ square cake pan and one 9″ round cake pan. Bake and cool cakes as your recipe requires. Remove cakes from pans.
2. Download the Bunny Rabbit Cake Pattern (the pattern is a .PDF file which requires the free Adobe Acrobat Reader). Print out and cut out each pattern piece.
3. Place the cut out pattern pieces on top of the 9″ square layer. Use a sharp knife to cut out the cake pieces.

   NOTE: The small piece marked “hair” is a fussy bit. I love the rakish charm it adds to the rabbit cake, but if you’re short on time or don’t like fiddly bits, you can omit this piece and still have a wonderful bunny rabbit cake.

4. Frost the round cake with frosting of your choice (I used the Butteriest Buttercream Frosting) tinted in the color of your choice.
5. Frost the hair, ears, and body pieces. Do not frost the edges that will be placed against the round (already frosted).
6. Place the hair, ears, and body pieces in position with the head. Add frosting to mask where parts are joined to the round.
7. Smooth the buttercream frosting by using the “paper towel” method demonstrated in this video.
8. Decorate with your choice of candies, different colored frostings, or, as I did, you can make pressed sugar decorations.

Now enjoy your utterly charming rabbit cake which can grace your bunny rabbit party or your Easter egg hunting party.

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Classic Bunny Rabbit Cake

Here we have the classic bunny rabbit cake that Grandma first whipped up a long time ago — and even more Grandmas got into the act in 1973 with a copy of the Baker’s Coconut Cut Up Cakes (see the second “Easter Bunny Cake”).

Classic Bunny Rabbit Cutting Pattern

It’s a fabulous cake for anyone who loves cake-retro or who wants an easy and extremely forgiving (coconut covers a multitude of sins) bunny rabbit cake.

The instructions are super simple:

1. Bake any cake recipe in two round pans.
2. Cut one cake round as shown in the diagram to the right. Leave second cake round whole.
3. Place two “A” pieces (see diagram) as the bunny rabbit’s ears and place the “B” piece as the bunny rabbit’s smart and fancy bow tie.
4. Frost entire cake. You may frost the bow tie in a contrasting color.
5. Sprinkle coconut over rabbit.
6. Use decorator tubes, colored candies, or pressed sugar decorations to create the bunny rabbit’s face.

I told you it was simple. He’s the perfect cake for anyone who loves bunny rabbits or as the featured guest at this year’s Easter Egg Hunt.

Easter Bunny Cake

Another Easter Bunny Cake

And if you’d like a slightly more difficult and contemporary cake, check out this Easter Bunny Cake.

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