I'm finally onto my 2020 bakes, woohoo! Now here's a showstopper, my middle nephew's 10th birthday cake based on his favourite drink, Irn Bru.
To those out with Scotland, Irn Bru is a sweet, fizzy drink with a difficult to describe flavour (you can read about it here on wikipedia.) I can't say I've ever been a fan, but people who love it seriously LOVE it.
To those out with Scotland, Irn Bru is a sweet, fizzy drink with a difficult to describe flavour (you can read about it here on wikipedia.) I can't say I've ever been a fan, but people who love it seriously LOVE it.
To create this cake I started off with baking eight 6" round Victoria sponge cakes (an 8 egg mixture I think), although I only ended up using 7 sponges. I felt that was high enough to create the proportions of an Irn Bru can. I toyed with the idea of incorporating Irn Bru flavour into the cake as I had seen other bakers do this online, but came to the conclusion that it's really the visuals of the birthday cake that's important to my nephews, not necessarily exciting or unusual flavours.
Stacking this cake was rather intense. I think this is the most careful I've ever been with levelling cakes. Usually I'm pretty laid back (lazy) about this kind of thing but as this was going to be tall it had to be as level as possible. I took this photo mid construction as I thought it looked rather impressive.
Rolling out enough orange fondant to cover the sides was quite an event, but it actually went on surprisingly smooth and stress-free. The only scary moment I encountered was when I thought the orange colouring in the fondant had permanently stained my lovely oilcloth tablecloth, but after a lot of bleach and elbow grease I got it shifted. Phew!
To finish the cake I made some boiled sugar shards to stick on top to mimic juice fizzing and bursting out the can. Usually it takes me two or three attempts to make anything caramel/sugar shard related but this worked first time. Yay! I also used silver edible paint for the top layer of fondant which did the job at bringing the can to life. It looked more effective than a grey fondant.
The birthday boy was thoroughly delighted with the cake and it tasted good too. Victoria sponge never disappoints. I was particularly pleased with how cool the cake looked cut open. It was an impressive cross section!