Monday, May 3, 2010
Pika... Pika... Pikachu!
My nephew Timothy celebrated his 11th birthday yesterday. He has a huge collection of Pokemon cards, so I thought he would appreciate a Pokemon cake!
I chose to make Pikachu, because he is the most well-loved one and more importantly because he is blob-shaped!! Hehehe, that meant he would be easy to make!
I didn't have a very good experience using Rice Krispies to make models, so this time I tried using cake instead. I find that cake is much easier to work with, and the only disadvantage would be it's weight. Therefore I made sure to use lots of support in the bottom base cake, lest the whole thing caved in!
The inside of Pikachu is carrot cake which I bought because I was too lazy to make so much cake! I first made a cylindrical shape by layering small circles of cake and then gradually carved out a rough shape of Pikachu. I then covered him in yellow fondant and used tinted fondant to make his facial features and stripes.
His appendages, i.e: tail, ears and limbs, were all made from gumpaste ahead of time. They were left to dry and harden for a couple of days. I stuck them on with the help of toothpicks. I had trouble with the tail which was heavy and sticking out at an angle. In the end, I resorted to using an external bamboo skewer. It didn't look too good, but at least Pikachu had a tail!
The tips of his ears I painted black, using food colouring diluted with a bit of alcohol based vanilla essence. The bottom of his tail was painted the same way, with brown. The base cake, I covered with red and white, which is the colour of the ball thingie from which these cute monsters emerge!
The base cake was banana cake which I did bake, and frost with bittersweet chocolate buttercream. It wasn't very popular with the kids, so I suppose I'll just stick to boring old chocolate cake next time.
So cute!
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