Marvel Heroes Birthday Cake
For my last blog post of 2014, I’m breaking the streak of Christmas recipes. I’ve been wanting to make a Marvel cake for a while now and the right occasion came along..in the form of Charlie’s 5th birthday. Novelty cakes are always fun to make, they’re a bit different and not something I get to do often, so keep reading to see how I managed to create this cake..
The cake itself was a two layer chocolate cake, with a caramel filling, covered with chocolate ganache, then decorated with sugarpaste. I wasn’t particularly neat when I covered the four quadrants, there were some gaps but this was easily solved with the addition of the black border; and it adds to the comic book effect!
Batman: There were two options for the logo here – you can either cut it out freehand, or print the logo and trace it. I went for the former, which was less difficult than I thought it would be. If you go for the freehand option, you just need two sizes of circular cutters and a sharp knife for the straight edges. I simply copied the shape from an image I had, would you believe this only took me one attempt?! I added the cape to the side to make it a bit more interesting, another option could be to add Batman’s utility belt if you have the patience!
Spiderman: This was probably the easiest character to decorate, the webbing could be created with either sugarpaste or piped buttercream – I went for sugarpaste because it was what I had to hand (and it’s quite hard to make black buttercream). With the rest of the decoration, there were again two options and I again, went for the easier of the two – you could cut out Spiderman’s eyes or the spider logo itself. The logo would probably be much easier if it was a print out, rather than if you tried to cut it freehand!
The Hulk: This was one of the characters that I had to think a little more about, I knew I wanted to make a Hulk fist, but wasn’t sure of the best approach. There was the option of using all sugarpaste (edible, but not particularly pleasant), buying an inedible toy fist or using rice krispy treats and covering with sugarpaste. I went for the rice krispy treat option – it’s really lightweight and still quite tasty!
To make rice krispy treats, I melted butter and marshmallows together, then added in the rice krispies which made it more malleable. I don’t have exact measurements for what I used, it was mostly guesswork – but there are several recipes online with exact measurements of how to make these treats. I let it cool down before I shaped it into a fist, then covered it with green sugarpaste and added some details for the fist itself. If you have time, I would highly suggest adding a layer of chocolate to the rice krispies before the sugarpaste goes on, as it’s quite bumpy without it.
The brick detailing that the fist is sitting on is simply drawn on – you don’t need a fancy embosser!
Wolverine: The ‘claws’ are also made out of rice krispy treats. I debated for a while how I would go about making the claws and went with the edible option rather than fashioning claws out of foil. They are a little thicker than I’d prefer, but these were as thin as I could go to ensure they still stood up. For this section, I first covered the cake with a layer of navy blue sugarpaste, before the yellow. This was to add to the effect of the rips, so that you could see a bit of the navy blue through the yellow. The Wolverine eyes were cut out freehand, just copied from an image I had.
To finish off, I cut out the shape in the middle and attempted some comic book style writing (think it needs to be a lot more comic sans-esque!) For this, I used an edible black ink pen. It’s important to let the sugarpaste harden before you attempt any writing, otherwise it will just pull and leave indentations.
One of my more adventurous cakes and definitely a good challenge! Here’s to more in 2015…
