I realise it's been a ridiculously long time since I last did a baking post, and that makes me quite sad because I've noticed that lately I've just seemed too busy to bake. But I thought today would be the perfect opportunity to change that so I'm really excited to be posting this! It's my boyfriends birthday today and it has become a sort of tradition that I bake him a surprise cake every year.
I'd seen similar cakes to this one on Pinterest but when I clicked through they had always been done by a professional baker or baking company, so obviously no how-to instructions! Despite this, I thought I'd just have a go with the skills that I already have and see what I could come up with. So here is my attempt at a monster cake!
I started with four plain sponge cakes, I use Mary Berry's all-in-one cake recipe but you can use whichever one you feel comfortable with. Three of the cakes will be used to stack and make the main body of the cake, while one will be crumbled up to make the cake-pop mixture.
After making the basic cakes I began the decorating process by making the cake-pops, as these are by far the most time consuming part if you don't have a lot of experience with them like me! I have made them before but only once so I don't own a cake-pop tin, so I used the crumbled cake mix method. There are plenty of videos on YouTube of how to do this but really, all you do is crumble up the cake into small bits (I cut off the crust beforehand), and add a scoop of buttercream/frosting so it becomes sticky enough to roll into ball shapes. It's a good idea to use your 'worst' cake for this bit because it doesn't matter if it's a bit misshapen! Once you've rolled them up and added the sticks, I found it helpful to refrigerate them for 10 minutes before decorating so that they were bound together a bit better. I then dipped them in white chocolate and put them in the fridge to fully set.
Next I moved on to icing the cake. I used the same plain buttercream which I added to the cake-pop mix to stack the three cakes on top of each other. Then I made up some more buttercream and coloured it orange (go for whatever colour you want!). I then scooped it into a piping bag and used a nozzle which looks like a star but with a flat edge on one side. Starting from the bottom, I iced little vertical dashes in a circle around the cake, and then made my way up ring by ring, slightly overlapping each row. This can be quite time consuming but keep at it because it really does look lovely and 'fury' once done!
All that the cake needed then was the finishing touches. I cut out five circles from royal icing that I had coloured black and stuck one to each of the cake-pops with a small blob of buttercream. Then I arranged them into two rows of eyeballs at different heights. The mouth is just cut from royal icing, a black strip and four white triangles for the teeth.
And voilà! This was such a fun cake to make, and although it can be time consuming with the extra element of the cake-pops, it isn't too difficult at all and the result is well worth it because it went down brilliantly with my boyfriend!
If you have any questions about how I created this cake just leave a comment below and I'd love to answer them. Also do let me know what you think about the cake and if you decide to give it a go!
x
