O Canada!

For a country that's half way around the world from Singapore, I have to say Canada has made some impressions in my life. Well for a start, I've had family there over the years so every now and then I'll hear about aunts, uncles and cousins who have set up home in the great white north. Then when I was at RD, one of my bosses who played a significant role in my journalism career is Canadian. He was a bear of a guy who wrote with his heart. There was Canuck jokes you don't always get but there's something 'aboot' him that's salt of the earth. I wrote some of my best pieces with him.

When I got married, my husband wanted me to experience premiere skiing for our honeymoon. We headed to Whistler, British Columbia. I'm all for skiing except the green slopes in Whistler were more like intermediate blue slopes everywhere else in the world. Plus it registered -25 degrees that year. I nearly died but it was one hell of a memorable trip.

One of my favourite confection to make when I first started baking was a no-bake three-layer bar of chocolate crumb base, followed by a layer of buttercream custard and topped with a rich dark chocolate ganache. It's called a Nanaimo bar, apparently a popular Canadian dessert that is named after the city of Nanaimo in British Columbia.

Nanaimo Squares

So when I got a call to make a batch of brownies with little Canadian flags as toppers, I was chuffed. I don't usually get orders for brownies. The lady who ordered these was one of the recipients of Daniel's cupcakes. She really liked the toppers and enjoyed the cupcake, so she got in touch for some customised brownies. I have a trusty recipe that yields a rich dense brownie with a shiny cracked top that is crumbly. I had forgotten how much I enjoy making these.

Canadian Chocolate Bar

The flags were handmade. Little red maple leaves printed, cut and then pasted on red art card and affixed on toothpicks. Each flag adorned the brownies that's topped with a swirl of ganache. Check out how I made those flags.

Stick it

Paste it

Flag it

White Disc = Frisbee

This is a one cake that will require some explanation. I got a very specific brief for this cake. A birthday cake for someone special, she's Filipino and she loves Ultimate Frisbee.

When I was researching this cake, it seemed all frisbee cakes just feature a disc (doh!) and unless you knew you were specifically looking for a frisbee cake, it would be pretty tough to say for sure what it is. (I tried it on my brother, I showed him the finished product and frisbee did not come to him immediately). I found a frisbee cake on cakecentral.com that I thought was quite clever – it incorporated grass into the design as frisbee is usually played in an open grass field. So anyway, I went ahead and built the cake. First a simple round cake as the 'stage' and then a smaller white disc of cake, covered in white fondant. I was going to pipe the birthday message on the frisbee itself.  

I also found myself making the Philippines flag two weeks in a row. If you read my post last week, you'd see that I had made a suitcase cake with emblems from around the world. What I didn't realised was that I had made the Philippines 'war flag' (gasp!). I learnt from my fellow blogger mum Eve that when the red strip is above the blue, it means the country is in a state of war. Upon reading more, I was consoled by the fact that even USA got it wrong - read this ;p 

Now that I'm wiser and given the chance to do this again, I made sure I got the flag right, with the blue on top.

At peace 

The trick with the frisbee was to make it look like it's slightly off the surface. I did this by piling in a support column and then fixed a 'cap' at the top for the disc to rest on. It was the husband that came up with this construction plan and it worked like a dream.

The very useful oreo cookie again

Then I wrapped my small disc of cake with white fondant and placed it at the top together with the flag. And here's the finished cake...

Happy Birthday Mel!

Admittedly, I could have added a few concentric lines on the white disc to make it look more like a frisbee. Well, now that I've explained this cake, do you think you'd have gotten frisbee at first sight? Tell me what you think ; )