Friday 23 May 2014

Jessie Cat Cake

For my daughter's 1st birthday I decided to make her a Jessie Cat Cake based on the character from Sing and Sign. She loves it when Jessie pops out of the box so I wanted to copy this in her cake. She also likes bright colours so I decided to make the cake a rainbow cake so that when it was cut it was really colourful inside. 

In order to create the box I decided to use 9" square tins, this is quite large so I needed quite a lot of cake mixture. My first attempt didn't really work out so I made some adjustments and came up with this recipe as the one I was happy with. 

Ingredients:
800g Butter
800g Caster Sugar
800g Self Raising Flour
16  Eggs
2tsp Baking Powder
2tsp Vanilla Essence

Cream together the butter and the sugar. Add the flour, baking powder and vanilla essence. Finally beat in the eggs until everything is combined and the mixture is smooth and creamy. 

Divide the mixture into 6 bowls (not 7 as I kept doing!) and colour each mixture with paste colours. These will give you a intense colour without changing the consistency of the mixture. I only have 8 colours so I had to use what I had, yellow, red, blue, green, pink and purple. 
Coloured Cake Mix
I used foil trays to bake the cakes so that I could bake several at the same time. These were trays, like lasagne trays, that I bought from the local Lakeland. Bake the cake for around 20 minutes at 180oC until the cakes spring back. 
Coloured Cake
Whilst they were cooling I made butter icing with 2:1 ratios of icing sugar to butter. I layered up the cakes using the butter icing and coated the cake which formed the crumb coating. 

I covered the cake in white sugar paste and then green sugar paste. I cut a cross on the top, folded this back to form the opening in the box. Using different colours and circles I decorated the box. Using icing I made a Jessie cat head. I would have made this out of rice krispie if I had more time and resources, next time, this time this was the quick option. It did drop and lose it's shape a little but not too drastically. 
Box ready for a cat
Something I also did for the first time on this cake was to edge the board with ribbon. This is certainly something I'll be doing again as it really gave a lovely finish to the board and looked much more professional. 
Finished Jessie Cake
Overall I was quite pleased with the cake and had many lovely comments about it. It was great fun to create. 

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