Charlie Alpha Kilo Echo!

As I tweeted last week, my hubby is returning home from overseas so I decided to make him a welcome home cake! Now I must first explain that his nickname is Frosty. Some of you may have seen the suggestions on my Facebook page to make him a Frosty The Snowman cake but even though it looks like we woke up in Oct outside, I just couldn't bring myself to do a Christmas theme cake in August!!!

So I began by making the normal Madeira cake mixture (10oz Butter, 10oz Flour, 10oz Sugar & 5 Eggs) and divided the mix between two 8-inch square tins and chucked them in the oven for approx 20mins. Whilst these were rising to perfection I began to create some of the different colour greens I needed to make camouflage icing. I had loads of blue icing left over from my Batman cake below, so thinking back to my primary school days, I remembered I needed to add some yellow colouring to get my green. 

Remember you'd be sitting there in class, half listening to the teacher going on about times tables, or potted plants or something, when next she'd announce it was arts and crafts time!!!!! Sweeeet! Get the bib on me Miss, because this is going to get fierce messy.

So back to the colour making. For inspiration I hung one of his uniforms over the door in the kitchen so I could get all the different shades of green as real as possible (not a stoopid as I look). I also had yellow left over from Batman, so I added blue to this to make a shade of green. Now the big challenge was the army shirt had lots of browns in it. To make brown I needed to blend yellow, red and blue, which started out like something out of Rainbow Bright. After much kneading, and reaching the early stages of Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, I eventually got it to a khaki brown. Going from light brown to dark brown proved very difficult indeed. I added black, and it looked like human excrement, and I added yellow and it was nion green. So it was a chapter of 50 Shades of Green after a while but  managed to get a few different version of green going on!!

I had seen a clip on Youtube on how to create a marble effect with blending two blocks of coloured icing together. I decided not chance this on the whole lot of my icing in case I made a total hames of it, so I just did this for a piece I was going to make in to a collar.

I proceeded to make up some butter icing and initially thought I would make it a khaki colour for the overall cake and place the different colour greens around it. So I made a cup of drinking chocolate to give that caramellie colour but that went pear shaped fairly lively!!! It made the butter cream very watery and not caramellie at all (the cheek of it). Another plan foiled! So decided to use the same concept for creating a brown colour; by adding red, yellow and blue colouring to the butter cream. So ya............this didn't go so well. Basically as soon as the yellow and red went in, it turned to pinkish. Then BRAINWAVE!!!!! I could use this as skin under the army shirt that I was going to create. I'm a frickin' genius.

I sandwiched together the two cakes with my newly invented genius skin colour butter cream and covered all around the cake with it as well. I figured that butter cream would offer a better sticking base for the fondant icing than jam (i'm seriously coming out with all sorts of genius ideas here, I amaze myself sometimes!). Now the entire cake is covered in "skin icing", then I take all the different shades of green and roll out little segments to place scattered on the cake, giving that camo effect. For the collar, I lined up rolls of all the different shades of green (as seen on Youtube clip) and twisted them around each other. I rolled them flat, then twisted them again, and then rolled it flat again.........you get the drift.....until you see the different coloured icing's edged blend in to each other. On reflection this would have worked perfectly for the whole cake, but hindsight is 50:50 as a friend of mine says!!

The finishing touches were the teenchie bits of white icing to make it look like stitching all around the collar, and of course my junior infants handwriting scrawled on the chesticle area!!!! And here's to another creation/attempt/fluke.................

You can see few more of these pics on my Facebook page. If you like then "like" the page.

Nana nana nana nana BATMAN!!!

This was my first attempt at making a proper theme birthday cake and let me tell you it took all flipping night!!! The cake making was the least of it. I started off with, what I thought was enough, ready to roll icing (lazy lady's version as it is a Tuesday night and I didn't get home from work until 6.30!!) and gradually coloured it blue for the background of the cake. Man who needs kettle bells class when you can build up muscle kneading a colour in to fondant icing!! I literally was sweating by the end of this stage. Then I figured out I did not have enough to cover the damn cake so had to add more white icing (another plus to having it pre-made!) which I then had to add further blue colouring to get it to the colour I needed!

So assembly time. I got the two separate 8-inch cakes and sandwiched them together with some Betty Crockers chocolate fudge buttercream (again pre-made but please refer to above reference to Tuesday!). Then I discovered I needed to coat the cake with something to make the roll icing stick, such as Apricot jam. PANIC......I do not have any Apricot jam!!!! Found raspberry jam and felt this would suffice......and I was right! 

Rolled out, now vibrant blue, icing to cover cake and gues what??? I had LOADS. Chipical (as they say in Clonmel!). So trimmed nicely around the edges and made sure the icing was smooth and even. Feeling pretty proud of myself at this stage might I add!

Next comes the all important Batman symbol for the top. Contrary to my apricot jam debacle, I had done my research on a template for the correct Batman symbol and luckily I had small and large versions, as this cake was smaller then I had thought! So I reverted back to my "How-Do-You-Do" days (for all you 80's Irish kids out ther!) and got out my baking paper to trace the symbol from the sheet I had printed to this so I could see the cake through it. So I took the remainder of the blue icing (waaaaay too much blue icing) and proceeded to add black colouring to this. I thought it was going to end up navy but it didn't (fluke!). I put my Mary Fitzgerald work of art Batman symbol traced over the black rolled out icing and drew over the outline so it left an indent in the icing underneath. Then I took off paper and was able to go around the full outline with a sharp knife (always ask and adult before using such utensils!) and TA DAAAA the Batman symbol was born. I've taken proud up an notch to well chuffed with myself.

Next I got some more pre-made fondant icing and added yellow colouring to it to make the light behind the symbol. I felt it was easier, due to the stencil I had, to make a large yellow circle and place the black symbol on top instead of black circle with the yellow outline and background over it. I didn't explain that very well but I hope you get the gist of it.

I stuck the circle and symbol on with jam (raspberry of course!) and rolled a bit of left over black icing in a sausage like form and wrapped that around the bottom (to make it all profess like) and around the symbol. I threw on a number 4 as the boy the cake is for is 4 (in case ye thought it was for me) and hey presto.........

Batman Cake for Dylan Slattery's 4th Birthday