madnad

SpiderCake

I was asked by a good friend to make a birthday cake for her cool kid. The birthday girl in question is not a typical girly girl. No, this kid likes dinosaurs, snakes, spiders and all things awesome.

To start off, I baked one half of a sphere cake pan. This was placed flat side down on a cake board. I whipped up a batch of salted caramel buttercream, then sandwiched the cake with a little of the buttercream and some home-made jam.

I applied a thin ‘crumb layer’ then put this in the fridge to set up a little while I took the remaining buttercream and divided it into two. I dyed one half green and one half purple, but you can obviously do which ever colours you like.

Mark 6 sections with a blunt knife on the crumb layer. In one section, using a #18 tip, pipe little stars in close rows so that the crumb layer underneath doesn’t show through. Repeat this in the adjoining section with the alternate colour.

Next, take about 100g of fondant coloured to your preference. Divide into 8 balls and position on the cake board 4 on each side of the spider’s body.

Now take 16 chocolate fingers and place them in the freezer for a 15 minutes so that the chocolate is nice and firm. Take a Tootsie Roll and warm it in your hand. Cut in half and roll each half into a ball. Take two of the chocolate fingers out of the freezer, leaving the rest in until you need them. Flatten the ball and mould around the end of one of each of the fingers as quickly as possible so as not to melt the chocolate.

Stick the end of one of the fingers into a fondant ‘foot’, with the Tootsie Roll end upwards. Using a sharp knife, poke a small hole in the body of the cake a fraction lower than the top of the finger. Push the end of the second finger into the hole, pressing the two Tootsie Roll covered ends together.

The eyes of the spider can be piped on or you can make them out of chocolate buttons like I did. I used edible glue to attach some royal icing eyeballs to the chocolate button then left to one side to set while I made the head.

To form the head, take three Kellogg’s Rice Krispie Treats and squash together to form a sort of oval shape. Dust your work surface with a little cornflour and roll out about 150g of fondant in whatever colour you want, and use this to wrap around the head. Smooth the gently with your hands that are lightly dusted in cornflour.

Dab a little edible glue and attach the eyes. Roll a little ball of fondant in the same colour as the feet and make a nose. Roll and cut out a strip to form a mouth, then use candy corn to form fangs. If you don’t have any candy corn, just make the fangs out of white fondant.

And your done.

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