The Seven Sleeping Dwarfs Cake

This is a cake I made for one of my sons' seventh birthday. Years ago. I saw it in a book borrowed from a library. I think it was a book by Jane Asher. It was my first attempt at making and using fondant. The one thing I remember was that it was easy to construct and it was so much fun. The bottom headboard broke into two so I just stuck them back together with royal icing.

The heads : Just round pink balls and smaller round pink balls for the noses except for sneezy who has a larger red nose. Stick the noses on with royal icing.

Nightcaps : Triangle pieces of fondant in various colours and wrap them around each little head stuck on with a bit of water or royal icing.

Faces : Just draw them on with a fine paint brush dipped in brown food colouring : the eyes and mouths.

Feet : You can't see them in the photo but there are seven pairs of little feet sticking out from under the blanket. Just shape pink pieces of fondant to look like feet!

Hands : Shape pink fondant into hands that curve over the blanket. Use a blade of a knife to mark the fingers. Seven pairs of them.

Slippers : Just shape pieces of fondant to look like slippers!

Bodies : They are just chocolate wafers under the blanket! Seven of them.

Head boards : Roll out the fondant in desired colour and cut out to size and allow to dry until hardened.

Blanket : The easiest part. Just roll out fondant into a rectangle large enough and drape over the 'bodies'.

Sneezy's white hanky : Easy as A B C. Just roll out fondant to size and stick to blanket.

Pillow : A long white rectangular piece just enough to fit the seven heads.


Construction :

Cover a cake board with fondant that is large enough for a cake and with at least 2 inches of extra space all around.
Use a cookie cutter to make attractive markings on the 'carpet' if you like.
Place a rectangular cake that's wide enough for seven chocolate wafers.
Cover with a 'bedsheet' of desired colour (preferably white)
Place the pillow on the top edge of cake.
Place all heads on the pillow.
Place chocolate wafers on cake to represent the bodies.
Cover with blanket so that it covers the wafers and the bottom edge of cake but leave a narrow space for feet.
Glue feet to bottom edge of blanket with royal icing.
Glue boards to both ends with royal icing.
Place slippers at bottom of bed.
Glue Sneezy's hanky to the blanket with royal icing.
Glue hands to the blanket arrangingy them suitably.
Pipe white beards for one or two of the dwarfs under their faces and over the blanket in curly wurly lines.

TIP : Only the heads, feet,little hands, slippers and headboards should be constructed ahead of time. The rest of the items are to be rolled out and constructed as you build up the bed.

There is no need to wait for the 'bedsheet' to dry or harden as it is just used to cover the cake and to not let the cake be visible from under the blanket. So it can just be thinly rolled fondant.

Rough Puff Pastry

I have decided to post this recipe anyway without photos. Will insert photos next time when I make it again.

You might want to double the recipe so that you can keep the extra for another use. I usually do that for quicker cooking next time. For a first time attempt though it would be better to do one recipe first.

250gm plain flour
1 tbsp icing sugar(optional)
250 gm butter, chilled and cubed into 1 cm cubes
1/4 pint cream/milk/water

Sift dry ingredients. Add cubed chilled butter and cut rapidly with two knives or a pastry cutter but stopping until the cubes are still quite large. In other words do not keep on cutting until the breadcrumb stage. Let the butter be in lumps the size of large.... pearls (I can't think of anything else at the moment).

Stir in just enough liquid for the mixture to adhere then gather into a ball with your hands. Press lightly to make it stick together and wrap in cling film and chill for 45 minutes or if in the freezer for half the time to let the dough rest and firm up the butter.

Lightly flour a work surface. Marble would be excellent. But not every other person (including me) has a marble top. So a wooden surface like a table would do as well. Work quickly though.

Place the cold dough on the surface. The dough should be quite hard. Sprinkle the dough with flour to prevent sticking.Press the ball down with the heel of your hand to flatten it. If necessary beat to flatten further with a rolling pin if the dough is really hard until it becomes a rough oval shape. Sprinkle surface of dough with flour if necessary.

Roll out dough with light forward strokes into a rough longish rectangle about 1/2 inch thick and it is three times as long as it is wide. Sprinkle with more flour if necessary. Don't worry if the edges are uneven. It will be for the first time.

Divide the dough, by eye, into four equal parts. Then fold the two ends over to meet in the middle. Then fold into half so that you now have four layers of dough. Got it?

Now turn the pastry 90 degrees so that the folded edges are at the sides and one open end is facing you. Roll out to a rectangle again as long as the first one. (About three times as long as it is wide). Fold as before and like before you will get a square again.

Repeat this twice more and chill for 30 minutes.

Remove from refrigerator. Roll out to a rectangle again and fold one more time and chill once more. After the last chilling the dough is ready to be used as in the Beef Curry Pie recipe below.

Don't get discouraged. It is not as hard as it sounds and if you follow the instructions you will get a beautiful puff in your pastry that you would want to make it again and again and again and again just the way you rolled and folded it again and again and again and again.

Problems you might encounter:

1. Butter gets soft on the first rolling - stop and chill in refrigerator until it hardens again. Better to let the butter be hard than 'just soft enough'. Little more elbow grease required but less problem of rolling out due to a too soft dough because of 'just soft enough' butter.

2. Make sure the butter pieces are not too large as lumps. If they are, as it happened to me before, you'll end up with lots of large spaces in between the lumps of butter after rolling, and after baking the pastry rose to a thousand fold but everyone thought they were eating leather because the 'spaces between the butter lumps' were obviously just a mixture of flour and water so when baked it became a tough and chewy crust.

3. A hot kitchen (because we live in a tropical country?) - make pastry when its cool like in the early part of the morning. Never in the middle of the afternoon or when the oven in the kitchen is on (especially if you have a small kitchen and the heat has nowhere else to go except into your pastry).

Beef Currry Pie with a Rough Puff Topping

I was thinking of chicken pies at first but after some pondering chicken pie began to sound a little boring so I ended up making some beef curry pies instead and baked them in those adorable bowls that I had just bought (scroll down some and you'll see pics of those adorable bowls at their best - a September Post, titled -It's a Sale! It's a Sale!).

This is my first try at a beef curry pie and I have to say that the filling tasted rather good and the finished pies looked quite, quite beautiful.

Because this curry would be eaten almost on its own I had to make sure that it wasn't too spicy.

Hence the use of only a tablespoon of curry powder to 1 kilo of meat, with tomato paste added for colour and extra cumin and fennel to make sure the curry flavour was still there without it being too spicy.

I made the rough puff pastry that you see in the picture from scratch but you could use ready made puff pastry if you like. I actually made the pastry a day earlier and kept it in the fridge.

I'll post the recipe for the pastry in a future post. I just did not have the time to take any pictures while I made it.

This recipe makes 4 very filling pies and is a meal in itself. Yum!


1 kg beef, cubed
1 tbsp curry powder
1 1/2 tbsp plain flour

1 medium potato, cubed
10-12 baby carrots, halved
1-2 stalks celery, chopped into chunks
200 gm button mushrooms, sliced

2 large onions, diced
2 cloves garlic crushed

1 tsp cumin powder/ jintan putih
1 tsp fennel powder/ jintan manis
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tbsp sweet chilly sauce ( I used Lingham)
1/2 tbsp light soy sauce
2 tsp sugar

2 1/2 cups water

2 tbsp plain flour + 1 tbsp butter mixed to a paste

2 tbsp oil plus 2 tbps extra for sauteing the onions and garlic.
1 tbsp butter

Salt for seasoning

Frozen puff pastry, thawed or a rough puff pastry made from scratch.

Coat beef cubes well with 1 1/2 tbsp flour, 1 tbsp curry powder and season with salt. Heat 2 tbsp oil and 1 tbsp butter in a wide shallow pan and brown beef cubes in three batches.

You may need to add a little extra oil or butter for the third batch if if dries up. Best to use a non-stick pan for this. Keep aside.

If the pan has residues of crust from the browning of the beef, add 1 cup of the water to the pan and stir to loosen the crust then add this later to the beef when the remaining water is added. There is a lot of flavour in here and it will be a waste to lose it.

Heat 2 tbsp oil in a medium sized pot and saute diced onions and garlic until soft and slightly golden around the edges. Add the browned beef cubes. Mix.

Add the cumin, fennel, tomato paste, chilly sauce. Mix to coat. Add the water that was poured into the pan used to brown the meat and the remaining 1 1/2 cups of water, the light soy sauce and sugar. Stir to mix.

Bring to a boil then turn down heat to simmer and let it cook until the beef is tender depending on the cut of meat you use it will probably take about 45 minutes to 1 hour or even more.

Add in all the sliced and chopped vegetables.




Cook until vegetables are very tender. Then add in the butter and flour paste to thicken the sauce. You may thicken further if desired by adding a teaspoon of cornflour mixed with water.

Season with more salt to taste.



When done keep aside and let it cool a little. Scoop the beef mixture into small to medium sized bowls that serves a person each.




(If you are using bought puff pastry make sure it has thawed completely.)

Roll out pastry onto a floured board to about slightly more than a quarter inch thick. I like my pastry to rise so high that you'll have to sit on it to bring it down. So the thicker it is the higher it will rise.

Cut the pastry into squares bigger than the mouth of the bowl so that the edges of the pastry when placed on the top will fall over the sides of the bowl. But no too much bigger though.

Brush the edges of the bowl with a brush dipped in a beaten egg and place the pastry on top. Cut a cross in the middle of the pastry top and brush the top with the beaten egg.

Place the pies on a baking tray to catch the drips as they bake.

Bake in a hot oven. I set the oven at 200 C and I baked it for 20-25 minutes until the pastries were golden brown and had risen to a thousand layers high. Enjoy.

Ready... Set... Go!

At last, at four o'clock this afternoon, I managed to pry myself out of the house and drop in at The Cake Connection.

The store has been occupying my mind since I heard about it a week ago. But I was completely mistaken about its location. So before I get sued or get carried off by the blog police I had better put things right.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Cupcake Art, The Cake Connection is located at Jaya One. But Jaya One is in actual fact not the newly renovated old Jaya Supermarket as I had thought simply because the Old Jaya Supermarket has not yet been renovated.

I went there first and saw to my dismay the old blue building looking dejected and forlorn. Absolutely in need of a renovation.

I asked around but no one seemed to have heard of Jaya One. But after a few twists and turns I laid eyes on Jaya One. Unfortunately that was not the end of my problem. It was merely problem number one.

Problem number two was finding the entrance to the, I dunno, AREA, I suppose. It wasn't a mall, it wasn't a row of shops, it wasn't a block of shops, it wasn't ...it just wasn't even the house that Jack built.

However, after a hunch, an insight and a touch of my female intuition I stepped out of the car in front of a flight of concrete steps leading to up a fluff of trees at the top that totally, almost totally, obscured whatever it obscured.

Before I attempted to walk up I looked at a guard seated quite comfortably on a chair at step number one.

Apprehensively, I approached him, fearing that I would be facing a language problem in case he might be a Myanmar who can't speak Malay or English while the only language I spoke was Malay and English. If so that would have been problem number three.

Thank God and to him that he understood me and told me that Kluang Station was at block D and waved his hand quite ambiguously.

Hmm.... Block D.... had I been a bird...I'd know where block D was right away. But from where I was coming from it could have been any which way and, by the way, there was nothing wrong with my sense of direction.

Being very enthusiastic about showing that I was lost I stopped and intruded into several conversations to ask for more directions to Kluang Station, although I wasn't actually going there.

I had heard that The Cake Connection was just above Kluang Station which was of course not a 'station' but a coffee shop modernized and chic.

Ah.. there it was...Kluang Station. I circled the place vulture-like, eyes sharpened to a glint, impatient and hawkish until the stairs leading to the first floor me could not find.

Ah.. the waiter boy... standing idly by, at the entrance, was just waiting to be of service. He curved his arm backwards to a flight of stairs, and me, me went up except that it wasn't a flight of stairs as me thought.

It was an entrance to a couple of lifts, one of them, lined with slightly punctured plywood.

When the doors to the lift opened I walked out, looked left, and it was like walking into a brick wall that just ran up to me. I almost bumped into the entrance to The Cake Connection.

After all the hassle and mazey detours I had been through arriving there was like getting a pie in my face.

I peered and rang the buzzer. Along came Sharmini ( please forgive me if I got your name wrong), very warm, friendly and welcoming. And so was her colleague Nancy.

I asked for some fondant embossers with pretty scroll-like designs so that I could blatantly copy, duplicate and plagiarize Zalita's cupcake art from South Africa but unfortunately they did not have any yet.

No matter, the place looked interesting and I was more than willing to idle between shelves.

They had loads of beautiful sugar paste flowers, in lilies, roses, daisies all beautifully crafted, bottles of vanilla extract, novelty cake tins and other cake art tools. A complete haven for cake art enthusiasts. They offered classes and warm, interested personnel. What more could one ask for. Check out The Cake Connection.

I picked a packet of...no not sea shells...of icing powder, went over to the counter and chatted with Sharmini while digging into my handbag for my money that was pining away in the deepest recesses of it.

Phew.... it was a good thing I was armed with two ringgit and eighty sen that day which made everything else there beyond my, no not imagination, my realisation.

However, I did not buy enough ingredients that I could make fondant with. So Bake with Yen here I come.

I arrived and the only thing that I got there though was a two ringgit bottle of glycerin. The cashier and staff were in a super 'take it or leave it' mood, as always, so I took it and left.

I turned left and eighty footsteps later I stepped into Chang Tung. Sour pusses sat like sentinels as I walked in.

I toured. I spotted bottles of Red Man food colour pastes and gum tragacanth substitutes that made me smile. They were CHEAP compared to the 'real' thing. Only four ringgit and seventy sen for a bottle of 60 gm of gum tragacanth. I grabbed four bottles of Red Man colour pastes and a bottle of gum tragacanth substitute and forgave the sour pusses.

These were what I bought today. All in all I spent fifty one ringgit, I think, for cupcake art that's still as abstract and as impalpable as my dreams but perhaps one step closer.