Erin’s Birthday Cake

In something of a promotion from my last birthday-related cake-based project, I have moved from making the accompanying cupcakes to the main event.  That’s right; this time, I got to make the one with the candles, the theme song and the massive amounts of fondant icing.

A lot of love, labour and chocolate went into this cake.  It took me about four hours all in all, leaving my friend and I just enough time to deliver it to Frankie & Benny’s before the arrival of the birthday girl.  Aside from the aforementioned ingredients, it also involved a lot of planning.  Before the meal, a few people were going to Cadbury World to consume large amounts of free chocolate and ride around in a cocoa bean.  While I love chocolate and would never eat anything else (except ratatouille, cheeseburgers and bacon) if it were in any way practical and socially acceptable, I thought that in this case chocolate cake might be a bit too much.  I had a recipe for strawberry cake which I thought might do.  Cue an undercover mission involving much confusion over the nature of Bakewell tarts in order to find out whether Erin likes strawberries.  Having ascertained that she doesn’t mind them, I exhibited a tremendous lack of imagination and decided to make chocolate cake (well, bacon has its limitations as far as cakes go).

For the triple-layered chocolate sponge I used the Hummingbird Bakery’s recipe for Brooklyn Blackout Cake.  I had used it before, for the Clown Cake, and it proved to be just as reliable this time, with a lovely crumbly sponge texture and rich flavour.  For the filling I halved the chocolate custard recipe from the same page in The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook.  It was the strangest thing I have ever made.  If the caster sugar, golden syrup, cocoa powder and water boiling on the stove was not concerning enough, the gloopy, gluey Flubber-like cornflour and water mixture looked entirely inedible.  However, when the two were combined, it somehow, inexplicably, worked, which just goes to support the theory that adding chocolate to anything can only improve it (unless that thing is bacon).

The trickiest bit was the decoration.  While I take a neurotic and creative pride in the appearance of all of my cakes (including the resiliently messy Mississippi Mud Pies), this cake, as a birthday cake, had to look particularly special.  Having spent a while pondering, I had an epiphany in a truly inspirational place: the baking aisle of Sainsbury’s in Selly Oak.  In order to carry out my vision, I found a video on YouTube which showed how to make a simple rose out of fondant icing, which is something I had wanted to try.  The video is quick but very clear and helpful, and can be found here.  I made a few the night before, also experimenting with food dye.  While the video recommends using colouring paste, I found that a small amount of liquid food dye (much easier to get hold of) does not affect the rigidity of the flower too much.  I used bright pink food dye on a lump of white fondant icing large enough for nine roses (well, twelve), which would mean everyone going could have a rose and they would all be a consistent colour.  I made them while the cakes were in the oven, and while they are simple to make they are trickier to really refine; the sizing was slightly inconsistent and some of them looked more rose-like and delicate than others.  However, all together they seemed to work.

Over Christmas, my Grandma and I decorated a fruit cake using fondant icing and those small silver balls widely regarded as a marvel akin to sliced bread and the pyramids.  We cut a snowflake shape out of the icing, stuck the icing to the cake, then filled the shape with the balls.  I decided that rather than writing Erin’s name on the cake in my typically shaky, small-child style, I would cut her name out and fill it with the pink sparkles that had been missing from Mum and Aunty Jane’s Birthday Cupcakes.  I rolled out the fondant and cut around the outside of the cake tin to get the right size and shape, then cut her name out in the middle of the cake.  Thankfully, ‘Erin’ is as short as it is pretty, and has lots of lovely straight letters, so it was not that difficult.  Having smoothed some more chocolate custard over the top, I very carefully lifted the icing and placed it on the top.  Cutting around the tin had helped but I still had to straighten the edges and smooth it all out a bit once it was on the cake.  I then filled each letter with a sizable amount of pink sparkles, trimmed the ends of the roses and pressed them gently round the letters.

Having finished, I could not quite believe that everything had gone according to plan.  Nothing broke, nothing was undercooked, the mysterious icing mixture came together, the roses looked at least vaguely like roses, the name was readable and vaguely in the centre and nothing fell off.  Of course, it wasn’t perfect; the angle it was leaning at made a certain Italian tower feel threatened, a few of the roses more closely resembled cabbages and the fondant wasn’t a perfect size.  However, as I handed it over to the very nice people at Frankie & Benny’s and asked in an alarmingly motherly way if it could sit somewhere cool, I felt very proud of my creation.  Fortunately, Erin appreciated having cake presented to her in public, accompanied by loud music and balloons.  She loved the cake and was genuinely grateful, which meant a lot.  Even those friends who had been to Cadbury World and never wanted to see chocolate again were nice enough to force down a slice and say it tasted good.  This all suggests, to my mind at least, that public displays of friendship and birthdays go better when cake is involved.