Water colour cake with crazy topper

Water colour cake with crazy topper

I still owed my wife a decent birthday cake. You can read about the backstory to this comment and the epic fail in this post: https://dadmakingcakes.blogspot.com/2017/07/frankenstein-cake-aka-how-not-to-make.html

2 years on and I've picked up a few new tricks so hopefully it's a much better cake this time. My wife looked around for cake pictures she liked and settled on a tall cylindrical water colour cake. I hadn't made a water colour cake before so it's new territory for me.

To be honest I started with the cake topper as this intrigued me the most but lets get the cake out of the way first.

CAKE

Once again I used this fantastic recipe (https://dadmakingcakes.blogspot.com/2019/07/chocolate-mud-cake-super-easy-yummy-and.html) but the downside to this delicious gooey cake is that it takes nearly 2 hours to make each cake after allowing time for the cake to cool, etc. And I only have 1 small circular cake tin so the oven was on from 7:30 until 17:00 to make 4 layers of cake.

Naturally it's really important that each level is, well, level (bad Dad jokes are permitted on this Dad blog) so I used the baking strips for each layer (https://dadmakingcakes.blogspot.com/2017/08/how-to-bake-cake-with-flat-top.html): 

Once the cake was baked I made up the white icing putting some aside to make a light and darker pink in separate bowls to add later.

The layers were stacked onto each other, crumb coated and placed into the fridge. I didn't realise when I started how important this step is. It's a bit like underwear on a cake. Doesn't that sound like a tasty metaphor :-/ It creates a thin later around the cake to stick the cake crumbs down and help make the final cake look smooth. Placing the cake in the fridge makes the icing hard.

After about 15-20 minutes the cake comes out of the fridge and I use a piece of baking paper to smooth out and small lumps and jagged bits in the icing.

Then I put a thicker second layer of icing on the cake and smooth it down using my smoothing trick: https://dadmakingcakes.blogspot.com/2019/07/smooth-icing-on-cakes-how.html

Having a turntable is very helpful for this step. I couldn't find one I likes to built my own: https://dadmakingcakes.blogspot.com/2017/07/cake-turntable.html

Then it was time to do the watercolour! 

Randomly placed a few spoonful's of icing around the cake and smoothed it down using the spatula.

And before you know it the cake looks great!

TOPPER

I had no idea what I was going to do here but it was going to be fun. I wanted some kind of sculpture thing on the top and was considering something crystallised and shattered but didn't settle on anything I liked. 

Then randomly I had the idea of blowing up a small balloon and running tempered chocolate off it to make a strange spiky sculpture. To do this the balloon needs to be hanging and ideally the angle of the balloon can change to make the spikes dry in different directions.

Tying a string to the balloon wouldn't allow for variations in the angle of the balloon so I came up with the following solution:

1. Blow up a small balloon
2. Build a Duplo structure around the bottom of the balloon to create tension in the balloon (the balloon tail is pulled tightly).
3. Attach the Duplo/Balloon contraption to an off-cut piece of wood and attach this to a camera tripod which can vary and lock it's angle. And lots of ductape of course.

Everything was going well until I tried to pour the molten chocolate on the balloon (another first). I couldn't get the chocolate to be runny enough to pour it so resorted to spooning clumps of molten chocolate to the balloon at a time. Because of the thickness of the chocolate I decided not to change the angle of the balloon so the whole tripod/duplo system was a waste of time. O well, was fun anyway.

Started with the bottom of the balloon and worked up towards the sides.

I was mindful of deflating the balloon later on and thought that the sides would be where most of the tension would be so made the sides very thick.

When the chocolate was cool and hard I added a second layer of chocolate to make it as strong and thick as possible.

Once the sculpture was cool and hard the balloon was popped and removed. As an added little surprise for the kids I hid teddy bear jelly pieces under the cake topper.

The last step was to make the cake a little healthier (haha, like it makes a big difference after all that sugar and butter) by adding raspberries to the top. Once again it's maths to the rescue by using a protractor to measure out the spacing evenly. 

And I received a big tick of approval from my wife so she's finally had a nice birthday cake!