Whilst researching Twelfth Night traditions this January I happened across a photo of a stunning Twelfth Night cake. Mary Berry had made this cake a few years back for a BBC programme about Christmas at Harewood House (a Georgian stately home near Leeds). Utterly in love with it I wanted to know how the cake was made, particularly how the icing was made to look such a shiny gold colour, and how the lace around the outside was so beautifully formed. I wanted to be able to make that cake, and in a fit of ambition I decided that I would learn all the techniques and purchase all the materials required to recreate it.
Last weekend I made the fruit cake that is the main element of a British Twelfth Night cake. I didn’t follow Mary’s recipe for this, instead adapting a Christmas cake recipe from a friend’s mother. It turned out well, and I am now feeding brandy to the cake every weekend for a few weeks before decorating it. This is a tradition that makes fruit cakes wonderfully tasty and moist.
So far so good!
Then yesterday I made several attempts to craft the edible lace. Several months ago I purchased all (or so I thought!) the items needed to make this from scratch. I could of course buy the lace ready-made, but decided that this would not be in the spirit of what I am doing, ie learning new skills to recreate a culinary masterpiece. So I am determinedly making the lace from scratch.
I was particularly daunted by this task. However, I have watched many tutorials on YouTube for making edible lace that make this look easy, so I began with confidence. After five attempts I can now say with certainty that making edible lace is in fact not remotely easy. The photo below shows the results of my fourth attempt.
After my fifth experience of discovering how not to make edible cake lace I rewatched some tutorial videos. That’s when I realised that part of the problem I’m having is because I don’t have a good scraper. In all the videos the final stage before baking is scraping the mould to remove the excess paste, and all the tutors use a large chef’s scraper to do this. I’ve been using a silicone spatula instead, and haven’t managed to get the top of the mould as clean as they do. So I’ve ordered a steel chef’s scraper, and hope for a successful edible lace-making experience later this week once it has arrived.
