Friday 5 July 2013

Arsenal Cake

Gary asked me to make a cake for someone at work this week, he had been working there for 20 years and Gary thought it would be nice to celebrate this. The guy is an Arsenal fan so we decided I'd make a cake of the Arsenal badge. 

In order to design this cake I found a logo on the internet and printed it out on A4 paper. I then used this as a template on my chocolate sponge. A friend told me that it was easier to carve the cake if cold so I placed it in the fridge overnight and sliced it in the morning. Once carved I covered it with chocolate buttercream
Buttercream covered cake
 I then set about doing the icing, as usual I used ready made icing and my gel colours to create what I wanted. I decided to cover the cake in gold icing, however, I struggled to get a gold colour. I started off with yellow and then according to wilton website I should add a small amount of green. I decided to test this with a small ball but it just turned green!! So I tried again with even less green. It worked a little better so I did it with the whole ball of icing. I didn't really get gold, but I didn't want to risk making it green so decided it was close enough. 
My 3 icing piles
I then used this to cover the cake and careful cut trimmed around the edges. 

Covered and trimmed cake
Next step was to start the badge on the top. I first made some icing blue and, using the template, cut the strips to go around the outside. I then coloured some icing red. I noticed that the badge isn't a solid red but has a darker red on the right, so I cut these as 2 halves colouring the right slightly more with a touch of black to make it darker. 
Red and blue added. 
Using the gold icing and template I'd made earlier I carefully cut out a cannon. 
Cannon made
I then cut out the letters using the template and stuck these on. I also used the white icing to complete the strips around the outside. I did this by placing the icing on top and cutting it to fit the gap between the red and blue. I did it like this rather than using the template because the badge was slightly off shape by now and so the sizes wouldn't quite match up. 
Cannon and letters stuck on. 
 The final step was to complete the detailing on the cannon and the letters. I used white around the cannon and gold around the letters. To do this I careful rolled the icing into really thin sausages. Using edible glue I stuck these around in the detailing and used a toothpick to neaten up the shaping. This isn't the ideal way to do this but I'm not confident enough about my piping skills just yet to do this by hand. 
Finished cake
And that was the cake finished. I was reasonably happy with the end product. It's clearly identifiable, which is the most important thing, but as always there are things I think I could improve. Practice makes perfect!! 

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