Cake One

[angharad_gam]

So not catastrophes, though possibly not quite as amazing as I was hoping for. Nevertheless, here we go. I’ll put the finished product up here, but those who would like to see the process can look below the cut.

When I asked Ashwyn what he wanted for his birthday this year (cake-wise) he replied ‘A Sonic cake’. He is mad about Sonic the Hedgehog (in fact that’s all he asked for for his birthday – Sonic stuff). So I thought ‘hmmm, this might be doable’. Because I was short on time, and wasn’t sure how it would work out I used a store bought sponge as the base of the cake. Next time I will make it myself, as it is nicer.

I bought some royal icing mix, because I mistakenly confused it with fondant icing, but after considering them both I decided to stick with buttercream icing because it was easier and required fewer steps (and therefore less time). Fondant icing is pretty awesome looking, but if you look at the ingredients it barely qualifies as food.

So, step 1: make rather a lot of buttercream icing

Step 2: Use all the blue food colouring

Okay, so this wasn’t quite all – maybe a third of a bottle. That’s quite a lot if you consider that in most food colouring applications you just need a few drops. However Sonic is actually quite a dark blue and the ordinary blue food colouring you get from the supermarket tends to more of a sky blue shade. This was about as dark as I could get it without the icing getting too runny.

Step 3: Try to get the food colouring off your hands

These were my fingers after washing! Fortunately most of it came off in the shower later on, but I was thinking maybe I should use this stuff to dye my hair (a short Googling later – actually dying your hair with food colouring is apparently a thing and I am seriously tempted to give it a go)

Step 4: Take two round cakes and make them look like Sonic’s head

I actually traced around the cakes on some greaseproof paper and made some templates for cutting out the spikes and the ear. It was definitely worth taking the time to do this, and not trying to do it freestyle. You’ll note that I couldn’t fit the longest spike into the round cake and had to cut the end as a separate piece.

You can’t quite see in this picture, but I have cut the main cake in half and sandwiched the halves together with jam.

Step 5: Stick the bits together

I retained a small amount of undyed buttercream and used this to stick the spikes onto the cake (and to each other). When I did this the slight difference in height between the spike and the main cake disappeared.

Step 6: Smear buttercream on the outside of the cake

Buttercream covers many ills.

As you can see I also used the undyed buttercream for the lower half of Sonic’s face and his other ear. I made templates for the shape of this part and also for the eyes that I made in ordinary icing.

As you can see the buttercream is covering up the joins in the cake quite nicely.

Step 7: Make sure you get in all the gaps!

Getting the icing inside the spikes was the hardest part, not just because it is a small space, but also because where the cake was cut it was crumby and the crumbs tended to come off in the icing.

Step 8: The eyes

I actually made this by putting the template underneath the baking paper so there was no chance I would accidentally get pen or pencil in my icing. This is just ordinary icing made very stiff and then left to dry. I might have been better off using royal icing for this as it dries very hard, but that can take a while to dry properly, apparently. I also should have left this longer as it did not come off the paper quite intact and so the eyes on the cake are not quite as nice looking as I hoped.

Step 9; Fin!

The eyeballs, nose and mouth are drawn on with a tube of ‘writing icing’. The ingredient that makes it black is ‘vegetable carbon’ and it tastes like it too, so don’t ever plan on using that stuff for large areas.

And that was that. Ashwyn was deeply impressed, and so was I to be honest.

Addendum: this was Sonic's ultimate fate