With both my children's birthdays falling in the Autumn I'm feeling birthday cake making withdrawl symptoms; so of course I was going to offer to make a cake for
PurpleMum when she asked for help with
Wondergirl's 2nd birthday party.
The theme was "a teddy bear's picnic", so I (of course) popped over to Pinterest for some cake ideas. I pinned several, then asked which she would like. PurpleElla did at first choose just a face, saying it would be easier for me (she's very kind like that), but I said she didn't have to pick one just because it was easy (because I'm kind like that). So she picked one from the
Martha Stewart website.
Looking at the instructions for the Martha Stewart one it would have made the biggest cake I had every seen, I couldn't find a cake board big enough and, quite frankly, if I'd made this one the Purple Family would still be eating leftover birthday cake next month. I scaled it down to half the size and it was still a 6 egg cake!! (If you don't bake a regular sized victoria sponge takes 3 eggs).
So if you want to make a sensible sized version of this cake you will need:
For the cake:
6 eggs
350g butter
350g caster sugar
350g self raising flour
2tsp vanilla essence
For the Icing (I did buttercream instead of Martha's suggested fondant):
1kg (!!) icing sugar
500g butter
4tbsp Cocoa powder
2tsp vanilla essence
water
Decoration:
I used a flat chocolate chip for the nose and wilton candy eyeballs, but you could use smarties.
Equipment (ignoring regular cake baking things like spatulas!)
A 25x35cm rectangular tray bake tin (you could get away with a slightly smaller one, I did have a small amount of cake left over, which I used to put the candles on)
A huge cake board! (mine was 18 inches)
Piping bags
a grass nozzle
a printer
Put the butter, caster sugar, eggs and vanilla essence in a mixing bowl, sift the flour over the top and mix until smooth.
Bake for 30 mins at 180*C
Once the cake has cooled place it in the freezer for at least a couple of hours.
Print out the template from the Martha Stewart website, selecting the option that prints 2 pages of the PDF per sheet of paper.
Place the template sections on top of the frozen cake laid out like this (or in any other way that fits if your tray is smaller).
Cut these sections out of the cake. My weapon of choice for carving a frozen cake is a steak knife as it has a serated edge, but is less unweildy than a bread knife).
Now lay them out on the cake board them out and ice as per Martha Stewart's instructions (I used buttercream rather than fondant as I'm English and thats what we know!)
Not bad eh! It was time consuming, but not too hard, the "fur" covers all sorts of lumps and bumps brilliantly.
