I do this to myself every year. As soon as the Christmas music starts playing in stores and the lights and tinsel starts emerging from storage, I succumb to the festive cheer and convince myself I enjoy baking, launching into a frenzy of icing sugar clouds and silver dragée chasing. Then I remember I don't really have the time, energy or will for it. And I don't even really like cake. But yet, here I am with this years' effort and I'll probably not stop there. Last year I made hundreds of meticulously iced gingerbread biscuits for all the neighbours. Go figure.



So here is my bauble cake. Not bad effort if I don't say so myself, although being a daft brush, I took a touch too much off the bottom and ruined the shape somewhat. I was going for a vintage bauble look although the husband thought it looks more like Holy hand grenade of Monty Python fame. Once I photographed the cake for the blog I seriously considered shoving it in his face :)

I created the base using Lakeland's new Hemisphere cake pans, which are quite useful as you previously would have to carve a square cake and waste (or if you are me, eat) the off-cuts. My first attempt I used a Fiona Cairns recipe which I should have known better than to use as everything I have made from her Bake & Decorate book has been a "royal" disaster. The cake was heavy, didn't rise much and the wouldn't have made a decent sphere following the pan's instructions to only fill by 2/3. The second attempt I just used a plain ol' classic sponge recipe with a little cinnamon and satsuma juice to flavour. This did rise but then got stuck in the pan even after hefty buttering. As it was quite a light sponge it was prone to breaking but I salvaged it with some crafty buttercream repair work.