Type: Cake decorating
Materials: Cake, modelling chocolate, perseverance
With the design chosen, it was time to bake.
Initially all my planning was for an 8 inch cake, but soon realised that would be far too small for the 50 people it needed to feed. An 8 inch wouldn’t cut it. So I settled on a 10” cake (mistake #1).
I couldn't find a recipe I liked, so naturally I decided to invent one instead (mistake #2).
Suddenly there were so many parameters I’d never considered before: volume, diameter, temperature, fill height and a centre determined to sink. I kept under- or overbaking, no matter what combinations I tested. Visions of a collapsing cake and crying children, I baked about seven cakes, one as bad as another. Long story short (or not so short!), eventually I got the combination right and had two layers of chocolate cake ready to be frozen.
The vanilla cake too was a journey: First I tried to adjusted and omitted cocoa from my chocolate cake recipe to make it vanilla (mistake #3), but it turned out a chewy, wet mess. After three failed attempts I abandoned course and changed recipes altogether. This one delicious: buttery and soft.
At this point, after all the issues, I assumed the hard part was over, it was not.
I then deep dived into every strawberry flavoured icing recipe I could find, but nothing quite tasted like the icing I wanted to make. I tried ganache. Too rich. Cream cheese frosting. Too loose. In a stroke of genius I mixed the two and accidentally created something that tasted like strawberry gelato!
For decoration, I wanted flowers and letters hand piped with royal icing, because who needs store-bought? (mistake #4)
I also wanted sprinkles, children love sprinkles, I love sprinkles, who doesn’t love sprinkles? I needed sprinkles!
Then it dawned on me: royal icing and sprinkles dissolve on moisture-rich frosting (like mine). Disaster (and mistake #5) . What was I to do? I needed a Plan B.
Modelling chocolate!
Buy modelling chocolate? Absolutely not. I’d make my own- it is just chocolate and golden syrup after all. I soon realised (mistake #6), that white chocolate is no longer white when you add golden syrup to it (Did someone say titanium dioxide? Out of the question.). Adapt the recipe and make invert sugar instead of golden syrup? Obviously. And needless to say, I’d use only the best ingredients: Lindt chocolate.
Now I needed to colour the modelling chocolate. Children like colours. After hours of googling how to colour modelling chocolate naturally (you can’t), I compromised that this would be the only ‘artificial element’ I’d use. Ignoring my inner voice, I bought a cheap set of 10 oil based food colours off Amazon. (mistake #7). he coloured modelling chocolate smelled awful. It tasted even worse. There was no way I could feed that to a room full of four-year-olds.
Time was coming closer now and I had to find solutions fast- so I walked the 1.5h to the craft shop and back to get food colour gel, which, thank the gods, worked. I made flowers, sprinkles (that don’t melt) and bunting flag shapes with the coloured modelling chocolate, nowhere close to the delicate masterpieces I had envisioned. But good enough.
Next, the panda. The true test, I thought. Modelled out of (home made of course) Rice Krispie treats and covered with my Lindt modelling chocolate. But as fate would have it, he was probably the only part of this cake build that went to plan. I had extensively prepared: a cardboard model, a (nasty looking) saltplaydough model (mistake #8) and the more true to final, paper clay model. All crowned with a paper hat.
On the morning of the party (mistake #9) I assembled my piece de resistance.
I had never made such a big cake before, heck, I had never even piped icing before. Had I even made icing ever???!
My frosting creation is delicious but very unstable to work with. I also realised I didn’t have anything big enough to transport the cake in (mistake #9) I then had to build an impromptu cardboard car carrier (at least the Amazon came into handy there). box to take it with me- that in itself added another hour to the total time spent.
By this time, I was already running late and called a taxi to take us to the venue, where I left the cake on a counter for two hours to come to room temperature (mistake #10). Little did I know that the strawberries oxidise when exposed to air.
Slowly in front of my eyes my beautiful pink creation was turning brown around the edges and the few shop bought sprinkles I relented to using slowly started to bleed (mistake #11). I was horrified. By some merciful grace, it didn’t escalate, but by the time cutting time came, I was a nervous wreck.
Cake time arrived. The children were following the cake around like pied piper, they had set their minds on sugar and that was all they could keep their minds on. We slaughtered the cake, into a lot of little messy slivers to be devoured by a hoard of sugar starved children.
In the moment all the kids shovelled my cake into their mouths I realised I had gone way overboard (mistake #12). The kids would have eaten sawdust if I’d mixed it with enough sugar! I told myself never again. And so it was- until the next year’s rainbow cake.