Electric Cake!!!

I write this, tired and emotional, after an absolutely cracking weekend at Electric Picnic 2012. We got fantastic weather for the whole weekend. There was a few burny bodies going around on Sunday morning, even though Saturday only seemed overcast. My dear friend Jen is an avid music festival-goer. She threw out a mail early last year with a novel idea that she would like to celebrate her 30th birthday at Electric Picnic 2012! So a year on, and here we finally are - celebrating Jen's birthday at EP.

Since I have delved in to cake decorating world, it would be rude of me not to have a go at making an EP birthday cake. I Google'd "festival cake" and it threw up all sorts of mad yokes. Some cake look phenomenal and some just look weird. So I took the concept from a few cake pictures and came up with this:

You may not think it, but I've learned a thing or two from the previous cakes I've made; prepare as much in advance as possible!! The beauty of fondant icing is it keeps forever (apart from passed it's sell-by date obviously) so you can make all toppings and bits and bobs for the top of the cake a couple of days in advance. The tent is basically a slab of icing because I tried my best to roll out a sheet of icing and hold it up with cocktail sticks to drape down like a tent...............not a hope! It was 10pm and I just didn't have the energy to erect a miniature icing tent. I died a slab of icing yellow (to give a bright colour), and basically shaped it in to a triangle. The "strings" to the side are cocktail sticks, and just small balls of green died icing to look like rocks against the tent strings. The guitar was fairly simple: die a piece of icing red, roll out, cut out guitar body shape. Do the same with a smaller piece of white. The silver bits are silver decorating balls. I died another piece of icing black for the handle and strap, and ran a tub of white icing up along the guitar for the strings. The boots were a funny one! It was basically a lump of white icing moulded in an "L" shape and then I got my nifty ball shaper thingy and buried a hole in the top of the shoe to go down in to it. I had red icing left over from the guitar, so I rolled it out very thinly for the top and bottom of the wellies. Now I recently came across stuff called edible glue for cake decorating which is better to stick decorations to the top of the cake, rather than using butter cream. I was in my element at this point!!! I painted on the glue to the edge of the wellies and slowly attached the teeny tiny strip of rolled red icing, and every time my hand got stuck I could lick off the glue! This would have been fierce handy back when I was 11 and ACTUALLY glued my index finger and thumb together with super-glue (I was committing crimes like the new time back in the 90s without a trace before my skin grew back!).

The following evening I made the actual cake. So I took a normal recipe for a chocolate cake and times by 4 so there would be enough for everyone at the Picnic. As I measured out the ingredients I realised there was pretty much a full bag of sugar and 12 eggs going in to this mammoth cake (pass me the Gaviscon!) It was fairly liquidy mixture so as I poured it out on to the lined baking dish (a rectangular deep roasting dish to be exact), It filled up to near the top. So I said to myself, it looks dense enough, it probably won't rise much. WRONG!! After about 30mins the cake rose, and rose, and rose!! It was ginormous!!! It was now basically a big mountain slab of chocolate cake. The next challenge was trying to slice it through the middle to put some fudge butter cream icing in between, after it was cooled on a wire tray. This involved using my cake slicer thingy (like a thin wire you'd cut cheese with) and running this through the slab of cake. Then I had to place a baking tray on top of the cake, and flip over quickly to get it upside down! So at this point there is cake crumbs everywhere and I am again getting my upper body workout session. Now for the tricky part, taking off the top layer to line with fudge icing. This was a careful operation, one which require the help of my gorgeous assistant (hubby). We lifted it carefully from the bottom layer and placed on another tray to the side. Phew, it worked. So I spread the fudge icing on one layer, and carefully managed to get the next layer on top of it.


The finishing of it all was very simple; large amount of white fondant icing rolled out to cover all of the cake. Green fondant icing to cover over half of that, to look like grass. Then all the little bits an pieces were put on with my good friend edible glue! Now the writing is still a bit of a challenge to me, so I did the best I could folks. I kind of threw in the EP 2012 with glitter and the stars at the end to fill in the white gaps. Hey presto, there it is!! And further more, it made it all the way to Electric Picnic in 1 piece. The birthday girl was happy out....as you can see.