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.
