Received this Gruffalo cake order from a friend for her daughter's birthday party at least more than a month in advance and was dreading it for the entire time - I had never worked with sugar paste to create recognisable cartoon characters before! The spec of the cake was rather flexible - a Gruffalo themed carrot & banana cake for a small party. My friend left the rest to my imagination - no restrictions as to how the Gruffalo is to be presented/made and I got to use any colour I want. After going through countless of Gruffalo cake pictures others made on the internet, I was still rather unsure how I could actually pull this off.
I thought about making a carved cake in the shape of the Gruffalo inspired by this video but I am simply not confident enough with my cake carving skills - might end up with no cake to carve at all! I also considered the idea of making a one-tier Gruffalo flat cake in the shape of Gruffalo's head - this sounds simple enough but somehow I didn't think it was enough for the birthday girl. The birthday girl is also in love with the Gruffalo mouse so including the mouse would be a bonus.
The production of the cake took about three days from start to finish (with very little sleep) and oh how much I fought with the sugar paste - didn't have time to buy (and too expensive to buy) a huge amount of modelling paste so I ended up mixing Tylose powder with normal sugar paste to make the Gruffalo. The Tylose powder grade is that bit too fine and the sugar paste dried up rather quickly and cracked easily. The most difficult part of making the Gruffalo figure was surprisingly mixing colouring gel with sugar paste to get the right colour - sore hands were guaranteed!
Gruffalo figure front
Gruffalo figure back
Made the mouse, too!
Finishing product
Finishing product
Finishing product
According to my friend, her daughter discovered the cake through the holes of the cake box on their way home from picking up the cake and recognised the Gruffalo and the mouse immediately and started to talk to them - a success I suppose! The party goers liked the cake and how it tasted, too - I could not be more relieved with the outcome.
Sparkling Piggy
No comments:
Post a Comment