u/rarerollingobject

A cherry blossom/sakura exploding golden heart cake, a birthday cake for a friend who is one of the best people I know. He's someone who knows how to truly look at you and see you, who isn’t afraid of intensity, and sometimes looking at him (as a person, I don’t mean physically) is like looking at the sun.

And this is the same feeling sometimes I get in Japan in cherry blossom season, which I often travel there for, and where I always most wish I was, if I could be anywhere. The beauty of sakura is so electric that it almost vibrates and is sometimes almost too much to bear and you need to look away from time to time to best appreciate it in peripheral vision, and then you look back again and it almost floors you speechless how lovely one thing in this desolate world can be, and you feel heartened by that, in the darkness, for a moment. (But also a little beauty-aggression, like you kinda want to punch it in the MFing face for making you feel that way??)

And that’s like him; if you cut his heart open, I think you’d find blossom (plus a lot of other shit, but also blossom.) So it’s sakura cake, with all sakura things, brought back from Japan - vanilla cake with sakura syrup, sakura pudding buttercream, sakura arare and yatsuhashi (Japanese puffed rice and biscuits) and sakura kohakutou (crystal candy) as filling. And piped buttercream sakura blossoms. Swipe to the end for the last photos I took of the electric sakura of Kyoto.

Loved making this birthday cake for my mate who is herself is sunshine distilled into the shape of a person, so I wanted to make her a cake bursting with all the sunniness of citrus. She loves bergamot oranges and yuzu and all things sour, so I packed as many complicated citrus fruits into this giant beast as I could.

Gluten free (almond flour) vanilla and yuzu white chocolate cake, flecked with calamansi zest and a dusting of powdered dried bergamot peel; brushed in yuzu syrup; with a curd made from fresh yuzu juice and zest as well as bottled yuzu because a single yuzu fruit does not give up its juice yield easily; bergamot marmalade; candied bergamot rind and bergamot buttercream. With torched Italian meringue on the outside.

(Incidentally, the Uber driver on the way to her party was so taken with the smells emanating from the cake in his boot that we got into a long conversation about all the kinds of citrus there are in the world, and since I’d brought with me a bag of whole yuzu, calamansi and makrut limes for extra drizzling or last minute cake-smudge covering up, I gave him a fresh yuzu and some calamansi when we got out of the car..you’ve never seen a 20-something year old bloke in a doof doof music Subaru boyracer car look so entranced and mystified. It was lovely. ❤️)

A Wedgwood wild strawberry shortcake cake! As in, recreating the wild strawberry chinaware pattern.

It’s fresh strawberry cake, strawberry and black pepper syrup, strawberry and Pedro Ximenez jam, fresh diced strawberries, strawberry buttercream, freeze dried strawberries and crushed shortbread.

A cake I made for my public health sector colleagues’ skin cancer/sun smart awareness month event (I’m Australian, sun protection is a major thing here)

So it’s a beach-themed cake (I’m stupidly taken with the surf break part), with an edible chocolate tube of sunscreen, wafer paper sun umbrella and isomalt edible sugar sunglasses I made and broke about a million versions of before this one 😅 (note; strictly should be wraparound for sun safety purposes, my colleagues would behove me to say 😂)

I work in the public health sector and I was asked by some of my breast cancer colleagues if I’d make a cake for their breast cancer awareness month event, to which I said of course. So it’s abstract boobs 1 and 2 - one vanilla cake boob with salted caramel and crispy hazelnut praline, and one gluten free vanilla cake boob with passionfruit curd and white chocolate popping candy. And because there's no such thing as "flesh colour" - my boobs are diverse, if you're wondering if that's intentional. It is.

Then my skin cancer colleagues got wind of that - so I made a sunsmart cake for their skin cancer awareness event too, which I'll share another day. Just glad my bowel cancer people haven't piped up haha!

A cake I made for Bastille Day. Or, ok, a highly historically inaccurate Let Them Eat Cake cake.

It’s layers of vanilla cake with sudachi (a Japanese lime) syrup, shortbread, yuzu curd and blood lime; alternated with dark chocolate cake with salted caramel ganache.

36 macarons, and decapitatable Marie Antoinette, which is a salt and pepper shaker I should’ve filled with gold edible glitter dust for extra ridiculousness, in retrospect.

The cake I made to celebrate making a now dear friend - when one of my dogs knocked over and smashed a treasured antique Japanese vase (swipe to see smithereens), I was devastated and immediately googled for kintsugi repairers, landing serendipitously on a local artist, Yoko, who took it in that same day. She not only repaired it beautifully in gold but I gained a now very treasured friend in the process. Inspired by Yoko’s art and skill, here it is in cake - it’s pu’erh and lapsang souchong tea smoke cake, with saikyo miso caramel buttercream, sesame praline crunch and smoked salt.

Smoky lapsang souchong and fermented pu’erh teas, finely ground in a spice grinder and added to my usual vanilla cake base; then a syrup made from the lapsang souchong and sugar, brushed over each cake layer; saikyo miso caramel, some of it sandwiched as is between each layer, some of it whipped into buttercream; black and white sesame praline, feuilletine crispy toffee flakes and smoked salt.

It’s kind of become one of her hallmark pieces as a kintsugi artist; featured alongside my cake in a Sydney art magazine and as the cover imagery for her classes, quite the honour for my humble vase. ☺️

I once had a flatmate who was very annoying, largely because he would do things like use the shared kitchen tea towels to polish his shoes before carefully hanging them back up on the drawer handle, but mostly because he insisted on trying to be funny by using the wrong words for things in ways that stuck and have since entered my personal lexicon and are seemingly unstickable.

Things like ‘stationdragon’ rather than ‘stationwagon’, ‘merote troncol’, and insisting that ‘the Easter Budgie’ is a far better Aussie Easter icon than the Easter Bunny.

So at Easter, to thank my teams at work, I made a cake, and in memory of that drongo, made it an Easter Budgie cake. Dark chocolate cake, with whipped caramelised white chocolate ganache, salted caramel crunch and hazelnut praline. And mini party budgies.

Mossy rock cake. It’s almond cake with lemon curd, whole Raffaello white chocolate (the cakee’s favourite), coconut and almond truffles between each layer, and vanilla buttercream piped in varying shades of green, along with edible moss, which is just a torn up microwave sponge cake I made.

And candles I twisted and bent by soaking in hot water to soften them, shaping them, and letting them re-set. Mossy rock cake.