Christmas Bauble Cakes

It's Christmas box time again, and I spent the weekend cooking in earnest.  The works in progress are below:

 
This year, I desperately wanted to make Christmas bauble cakes (also known as temari cakes), because they look so gorgeous, and I have had the spherical mould for ages.  I found a great video on Youtube by Joe Hargreaves on how to make them here.

However, do not be fooled - Joe makes this look like a breeze, when in reality, it is a nightmare - a very long nightmare.  I made 14 of these cakes, and they are very time consuming, especially if you have other things to do as well.

The base cake recipe that I used was a madeira cake from Taste.  Frustratingly, I couldn't find what cake recipe people were using in my research, but someone mentioned that using a dense cake is best and they suggested madeira cake.  I was going to use the chocolate cake recipe that I made my Dalek cake from, but it didn't take well to the spherical moulds.

I used a half recipe of the Primrose Bakery vanilla buttercream to bind the cakes together:

 
I then coloured about 500g of ready to roll fondant light green, brushed the cakes with sieved warmed apricot jam, cut out circles of fondant and massaged them over the cakes.  I finished up by decorating the cakes with royal icing piped on top, and sugar pearls (and silver cachous for the white cakes - I didn't quite have enough green fondant): 

The first three that I made were not the greatest - two showed the join around the middle and I stretched the fondant too far on a third, so that the jam showed through a bit and the fondant had little stretch marks.  I also found it difficult to avoid pleating around the base on all of them.  And they seemed to take forever!!

However, in the end, I am happy enough with them - I can see all the faults, but when I look at the photos, they turned out pretty well.

There you go - if you are feeling creative and have quite a bit of time up your sleeve, you can try making  Christmas bauble cakes this year.  They look really good finished off with lustre, but I just don't have the time or inclination.