Hello all. I have been busy baking, but just things I've done before so no blogging. Recently though I made a birthday cake for someone who likes comics. I picked an Iron Man theme because it's one of his favourites, plus red and yellow were the 2 colours I had most of. It was meant to look like a stack of comics. I look a few pictures to show you all.
Using a standard victoria sponge recipe, I made 2 sheet cakes in a traybake tin. I cut each of these in two horizontally to make 4 thin layers, which I stacked in a haphazard way, using jam to 'stick' them together. The soft layers draped over one another.
Next I covered the top in black
sugarpaste to be the background to the cover page of the top comic.
To create the plaque for the top, I printed out a picture of Iron Man from the
Marvel website. Cutting round it created a stencil for rolled out red
sugarpaste. Removing the yellow sections from the stencil, cutting them out of the plaque and creating insets from rolled out yellow sugar paste then meant I could add it to the top of the cake. The
sugarpaste was also used to cover the flat sections
representing covers in the pile below. I had intended to put more details on these, but ran out of time. I used white to represent the pages, running a knife down the side to show pages. This was really fiddly and I didn't realise how much time it would take until half way
through. (It was only when I was finished that I noticed I'd forgotten to add coloured spines, and had used white all the way round but by that point didn't care!)
The final task was colouring in the plaque with my edible black marker pen. I copied this from the printout. This actually wasn't as tricky as it looked, and waiting for the icing to dry a bit and harden made a big difference, otherwise it created grooves in the surface.
I was really pleased with it in the end, though if I had to make it again I'd make a plain square cake without the misaligned layers and put more detail in. I have to say though. it was a bit awkward to cut but tasted good!
The final cake looked like this:
The final task was colouring in the plaque with my edible black marker pen. I copied this from the printout. This actually wasn't as tricky as it looked, and waiting for the icing to dry a bit and harden made a big difference, otherwise it created grooves in the surface.
These have always been known as german biscuits in my house, but it seems that apart from a few others, the rest of the world knows them as empire biscuits. They hail from Scotland and remind me of home bakeries. You can get them from supermarkets but they're always too dry and when I can nab them from a proper bakey I do.
