Some friends of ours were having a joint birthday dinner, so I offered to bring cake. I asked her what flavours and colours they liked. Blue, Purple and Chocolate.
So with that in mind I thought I would do a two tier cake, one for her and one for him, with some wired stars on top. Because the cake was for a boy and a girl I didn’t want to make it too girly so I decided on a diamond checker style design. So I did up a sketch with a few ideas and started first thing Friday after work.
Little did I know that it was going to be the hottest and muggiest weekend yet this year! With the temp at 34 and the humidity at about 90% I had to have the air con cranked all day and even then it was hard to work the icing.
From my hours of Utube and internet scouring I decided Mud cake was the best option with ganache filling. Once the cakes were baked and ganache made it was time to slice, stack and cover. So by midnight I had the cakes in the fridge ready to be covered the next day and the three portions of fondant coloured.
Originally I was going to do a black border and black stars. However getting fondant a good black colour is nearly impossible. So the stars ended up a sort of dark grey purple colour but they still turned out ok.
Saturday I started early. I rolled out my first large piece of fondant to cover the bottom cake. Mind you at this point I remember I don’t own a large rolling pin… What to do? Well luckily it is so close to Christmas as I had a think roll of wrapping paper that did the job perfectly. I found it was very difficult to get the fondant thin enough without sticking my fingers through it while trying to pick it up. But with some perseverance I managed to get it onto the cake.
Now I moved onto my diamond pieces. I rolled out my coloured fondant and using a ruler and pizza cutter cut out a heap of squares. I wrapped these in cling wrap to avoid them from drying out.
After sticking these all onto the cake and assembling the top layer I had to then decide how to finish the cake. I thought I would pipe in chocolate ‘happy birthday’ but I discovered my piping skills are about as good as a 7 year olds handwriting. So I managed to wipe this off and cut out a T and a K for the initials of the couple. With using some vodka I managed tod wipe the brown smudges off. However the alcohol did make the cake sticky so a little icing sugar was needed to remove the shine.
Once the stars were stabbed into the top I was done, just in time to get ready for dinner. The squares do cover a few mistakes and the cakes weren’t completely set before icing, but overall I think things turned out ok. One thing I didn’t realise was that it now weighed about 10kg and I had to carry it into Sizzler. Let’s just say the line up was interesting. And quite a few kids were keeping an eye on me.
