craftgrrl | Labor-of-love cake (Reply)

Inspired by someone's amazing (and hilarious) mushroom burger, I made this

for my gamer-nerd husband's 26th birthday.

Details below the cut.

(I have plenty of pictures of the process, but I didn't have time to upload them all right now. I can do that later if anyone's interested, but it was a pretty straightforward project.)

It was pretty easy, but I had a few problems with it. It doesn't look as nice and smooth as I'd imagined it, but I'm still happy with it. A separator plate and dowels would've helped, but I'm cheap. And I couldn't really justify spending that much money on something I'd most likely only use once, when we're already pretty tight on money.
It took quite a bit longer to bake than a normal cake because the pieces were extra-thick, but it worked out fine. I just baked store-bought white cake mix in a couple of differently-sized Pyrex bowls, cut off the big huge dome that formed on the top of the smaller piece during baking, slightly carved the "mushroom top" (similar to a muffin top, but not the same) so it would curve more and frosted the stem with white (store-bought) and the top with green (which was just the same white frosting, tinted with green and yellow food coloring... I just eyeballed the color). Then came the few problems I had to face: the top layer was much too heavy for the bottom layer (hence the need for a separator plate), so the bottom layer ended up being compressed to a fraction of its original size. Also, the icing was a little too warm when I put it on, so all the green dripped down and completely covered all the white on the bottom layer. At that point, I had been working for about two hours to get the cakes made and frosted, and I figured the best solution was to let them chill a while and fix it later. So I stuck the cake (and leftover icing) in the fridge overnight and the following day while I was at work.
That helped a lot. When I pulled the cake out of the fridge, things were much more manageable. I scraped off all the excess icing, re-iced the bottom layer and filled in the blank spots on the mushroom top. Then I freehanded the white dots and used a toothpick to smear on a couple of black decorator icing eyes. I printed a picture of Mario I found via Google images, colored it in with markers, added a 1-UP sign and stuck him in the top. Voila, perfect gamer cake.
I also piped stars onto the plate to form the number "26". I couldn't get the icing to squeeze freely, though, so they're just slightly deformed. Ah well. You have to be looking straight down at the cake to see what they say, anyway.

see?

I managed to do all of this without dying my fingers any funky colors, so this is a first for me. I mean, I was using food coloring and everything, and still, no dyed flesh. I was impressed with myself.

If anyone's interested in recreating the cake, I'm sure there are lots of things you could use to get the correct shape for the stem and top. My bowls were somewhere around 1 1/2 qt. and 2 cups. I had another, curvier glass bowl I wanted to use for the top, so I wouldn't have to carve the edges at all, but I wasn't sure if it was oven-safe. Fortunately it wasn't too difficult to slice a little bit off the top edge. Very fortunate, because I have almost no experience in cake-carving, unless you count this one time when I was a kid and got the crazy idea to make a ketchup-bottle cake... Anyway. The end result wasn't completely smooth, but icing covers all mistakes. ;)

And best of all, Luke loved it! Yay!