Birthday Cakes and an Experiment



Modelling chocolate models

We've had a couple of birthday cakes to do this weekend, firstly there's this number 3 cake with a Peppa pig theme.  I've made the pigs, little cake, dinosaur and presents out of modelling chocolate and love how they turned out. 


Peppa Pig



George Pig and Dine-saw

I decided to make the pigs true to their 2D look and kept the eyes on the same side of their head, they look a bit strange from the other side but I wanted them to look like they do when drawn, they look too different when the features are placed in their normal position. 

Peppa Pig themed number 3 cake

The hardest part about this cake was covering it in fondant icing, I'm still trying to perfect the best way of covering these types of cakes, but learning how to correct mistakes at the same time! 

We had a mixed bunch of cupcakes to go with the Peppa Pig cake too, here we have triple chocolate, honeycomb smash, lemon, whippy and victoria (vanilla sponge, raspberry jam and vanilla buttercream).


Fire engine cake

The other birthday cake we had to make was a fire engine for a little boy named Otis, I thought it would be fun to pipe the message as if it was water from the hose.  This cake was much easier to ice, a nice simple shape.

Seeing as we had off cuts of sponge and some left over buttercream from the cupcake making I thought I'd experiment with making Cake Pops, I've been meaning to do some for a while now, but I didn't have any lolly pop sticks.  So I thought I'd make cake bites instead.

All you have to do is break up the sponge into crumbs, mix in some buttercream and squish it all together, roll into balls and leave in the fridge to firm up.  As the sponge I was using was vanilla they looked like mini scotch eggs, which is what Jay thought they were, something to bear in mind if we ever need to make a cake with a pic nic theme and need to make cake versions of other food.

Cake bites disguised as scotch eggs

After chilling I melted some chocolate and begun covering the cake bites completely, drizzled some white chocolate across all of them and popped them back in the fridge to set.


Cake bites

And here they are, a plate full of cake bites, and they are rather scrummy.  The buttercream I used had smashed up Cadbury Crunchie in it so you get little bits of crunchie in these bites.  This is one experiment that turned out a little too well for my liking.....I can't stop eating these cake bites now!