Coronation Cookies

I couldn't miss the opportunity/excuse to do some baking for the coronation of King Charles III - it's certainly a momentous occasion no matter what you think of the royal family, and we are merrily joining in with the celebrations, with a street party and parties at school and Rainbows for my daughter.

My husband 3D printed me a crown-shaped cookie cutter, and I bought a cookie stamp from Etsy - not having realised this is something he could have 3D printed me as well so I will remember that for next time! I also had some red, white and blue sprinkles left over from last year's Jubilee which came in handy.

My icing technique is far from perfect but I'm quite pleased with these compared to my usual fairly messy icing. It is a bit fiddly to keep switching colour and icing bags but I think worth it!

I used a standard sugar cookie recipe, from BBC Good Food. My cookie cutter was quite large so I didn't get that many cookies out of it - about 9 crowns and 5 circles. My daughter had most of them to decorate as you can see below!

For the ones I did, I copied the shape and colours of the actual coronation crown and added what is supposed to be some gems along the bottom. I definitely need more practice with icing though but it's all just for fun - and my daughter had a great time making hers!

Regal birthday card for my mum

As my mum's birthday coincided with the jubilee weekend, I made her a "Queen for a day" card. I went with a red, white and blue theme as well, and used a white card blank with a blue square of card matted onto a red square. The crown is actually the end piece of an old Christmas cracker which I had in my craft box! I jazzed it up with a few sticky gems and used individual letter brads to make the word 'queen'. I wrote the rest of the sentence freehand, but used gold outline stickers to say happy birthday and 'to my dear mother'. It's not my favourite card that I've ever made but I thought it was quite topical.

Diamond Jubilee Crown Cake

I wanted to bake something to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and my mum's birthday which was the same weekend. I had an idea of a royal crown cake and browsed a few images online until I came up with an idea and a plan. Then a week later, the Mail on Sunday magazine only went and published a 'how to make a Jubilee crown cake' guide... damn it! In the end it was a handy reference guide anyway so I can't complain.

I found this butter in the supermarket and thought it was very appropriate for some Jubilee baking.

I had decided to make a Victoria sponge for the cake itself and that happened to be the one given in the Mail on Sunday article as well, so I decided to just follow their quantities, even though I wasn't following their instructions on how to assemble the cake.

450g butter, softened
450g caster sugar
450g self-raising flour
8 eggs
2 tsp vanilla flavouring
2 tsp baking powder

Cream the butter and the sugar... have I mentioned how much I love my Kitchenaid? :-)

Add eggs

Add flour, vanilla and baking powder

Here are the first two cakes after they came out of the oven. They sank a little in the middle which was strange, but in the end quite helpful as it made them easier to stack with the cakes that rose more.

The other two cakes

So to assemble the crown, I sandwiched all four cakes together with buttercream

 Then I carved the cakes at a downward diagonal to make a shape that was wider at the top than at the bottom

I decided that purple was a suitable regal colour (and annoyingly so did the Mail on Sunday... I promise I wasn't copying their cake!) and so coloured a kilogram of sugarpaste.

I rolled out some more fondant and cut it into long strips to go up the sides and over the top of the cake. I sprayed it with silver lustre spray and left it to dry. The Mail on Sunday article recommended using gold edible lustre which you mix with vodka to make a kind of paint - but I think the spray is a lot easier! And I wanted to make mine silver rather than gold.

 Oops, a bit of stray buttercream to clean off...

The Mail on Sunday piece also suggested using jelly diamonds, which come in different colours - I wanted to stick with the silver theme so I found these edible jelly diamonds online instead. They're proper 3D diamond shape and made of a clear jelly - they were a little fiddly to use but I think they worked really well.

I also wanted to make a ball and cross to go on top of the crown, so I started by rolling out a small piece of sugarpaste...

Which I then cut into a cross like this

Out came the silver spray again!

I also bought a diamond plunger cutter and used it to cut small diamonds out of the leftover sugarpaste

I made a ball out of fondant and sprayed that gold as well, and placed the cross on top. I think it looks quite good on top of the cake (shame about the rest of the cake....!)

I stuck the jelly diamonds with some edible glue on the strips on the sides and top of the cake, and stuck the fondant diamonds I had cut out around the side.

One idea in the Mail on Sunday piece which I really liked suggested crushing a packet of Fox's glacier mints and arranging the pieces around the edge of the cake like a fur trim

But as usual, my sugarpaste skills are far from perfect... my confidence was knocked a little recently by a rather nasty comment on a previous post, so I feel like I should point out here that I'm a complete amateur, I never pretended to be perfect and as long as I am enjoying what I do, why should it matter? :-)

It didn't look as good as the one in the magazine, but then these things never do.. at least not when I'm concerned! I still quite like the way it turned out, anyway. It would have been better to use a darker purple and make the silver strips a bit wider, and as usual the fondant tore a bit when I put it over the cake so I did have to do a repair job on one side. Never mind!

As a finishing touch, I arranged the jubilee cake balls and corgi cake balls around the edge.

Happy Diamond Jubilee, and happy birthday mum!

The letter for June's Alphabakes challenge - hosted this month by Ros - is V, and since this cake is a Victoria sponge I'm making it my first entry for the month (I'm sure I'll do at least one more!)

I am also entering this in Homemade by Fleur's Blogging Jubilee Baking Competition.  The competiton is sponsored by Appliances Online and the deadline is tomorrow. I'm looking forward to seeing everyone's entries and already have spotted a few that I think are potential winners!