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May 7, 2007

Critter Cake

We celebrated my 30th birthday on Cinco de Mayo this past weekend. I decided to try my hand at cake decorating, and of course I wanted something ridiculously advanced - an Amazing Amazon Cake. I know this has little to do with wildlife photography, but this is my blog, so I'm posting about my cake. It's also the reason I haven't posted here all week. It took that long to make the cake!

Inside the Cake

The filling was a moist carrot cake from Mich Turner's cake book Spectacular Cakes. It was made from mostly organic ingredients including coconut, walnuts, carrots, rum-soaked golden raisins, orange and lemon juice, flour and sugar. I got the recipe from a cake cookbook - the recipe was once used for Pierce Brosnan's wedding cake. Then the cake was split and frosted with a layer of orange buttercream frosting, covered with home-made marzipan to seal it for freshness and frosted again with orange buttercream.

Decorating the Cake

After that, I had to decorate the cake. With my short attention span, I knew I had to break up the work over a couple of days or I would start getting lazy and sloppy. Even tackling it this way, it was a lot of work each day. So after reviewing everything I needed to do, I planned my individual tasks:

Day 1: Buy remaining fresh ingredients
Day 2: Weigh fondant (sugar dough), flavor and color portions, ziplock
Day 3: Bake cakes, Cool, split and ice layers in orange buttercream
Day 4: Make marzipan, cover cakes, allow day to set. Sculpt animals
Day 5: Ice w/buttercream, assemble cake. Photos. Eat cake.

Sculpting the animals, including the elephant, lion, tiger, zebra and monkey (arguably a bear), took several hours alone. Each was about 5 inches high. We modified the plans to include tusks on the elephant and various other little touches. The fondant sugar paste is edible, but not very tasty. The only person interested in eating one was our young elementary school friend Jarod, who claimed the monkey.

Eating the Cake

This cake tasted nothing like a store-bought carrot cake. It was built more like a fruit cake, but since I hate fruitcake, its hard to explain why it was good. It was very moist from the citrus syrup you pour on it after you cook the cake, and then sealing it with marzipan. All the flavors - the cake, the syrup, the marzipan and the icing all mingled so well together, you didn't need to serve it with ice cream, etc. The cake recipe is for a wedding-like cake, and it looked and tasted like one.

Yum!

Posted by sorsha at May 7, 2007 3:51 PM