craftgrrl | Cat Cake - is cake crafty?

My daughter just had her birthday party. (Woo, I don't remember 9-year-olds being THAT catty when I was their age!) She wanted a cat-shaped cake. We're on A Budget, so buying it isn't really an option.

SO.

From this:

This is my "bread monster": sourdough culture. I love it. It makes everything easier to digest, and takes the "scream" out of sweet in cake recipes. It even reduces the need for baking soda in most leavened recipes. Baking soda imparts a less-than-finished baked taste to the food, I think. It may just be my own hang-up, though. I make just about everything floury with sourdough: pancakes, soda bread, yeast bread, cakes... Anyway. This cake was a chocolate sourdough. I made it quite substantial because A) I had almost 2 dozen egg yolks to use up after making a zillion meringues for the party; B) I don't like the store-bought cake consistency, it's all air and sugar; C) I've found that kids eat icing, not cake, so it doesn't matter.

Except this time, it mattered. Oh well. :-) They ate the icing.

From that, to THIS:

I baked two circles, and cut wedges from the second one to make the ears, "mortared" to the head with frosting. Black icing pigment purchased at Bulk Barn ($2 CDN for a teeny vial of black syrup, but I used only half a teaspoon in that batch of frosting, so I'm not going to complain). Green food colouring for the eyes. When you frost a cake, do the sides first, then cover the top. You can't really tell from this photo, but I've got a black nose and a black mouth outline (including septum below the nose). I dragged a fork across the icing's surface to give it the fur-with-direction look. The whiskers are curly birthday candles. Yes, we set them on fire.

My daughter's wearing the kitty ears. This is the best picture I have of the lit candles, unfortunately.

From sourdough culture to frosted cake, using only THESE:

I tried to use a piping bag the previous day to make meringues. Wow, what a mess. And I only needed it today for very small amounts of icing in different colours... so I spooned some icing into a sandwich bag, snipped off a teeny corner of the bag, and squeezed. I used a knife and spatula to spread the icing all over the cake, and used the sandwich bags for cleaning up the edges and some detail work, like the pupils, and the nose and mouth. You can't really tell, because they're black-on-black, but yeah, I put a nose and mouth on the cat cake. I think you can see them better in the pic below:

Yay, Mom!

Edited April 21 to add Sourdough Chocolate Cake recipe.

Please bear in mind that the kids totally PANNED this cake, although when I did the "practice" cake early in the week, my daughter declared it delicious. I'm not sure what went wrong with it the second time around. (I thought it was fine, so maybe ALL of her friends are just not used to HOMEMADE cakes, and instead have teethed on those fluffy store-bought or mix-box pan-poufs.)

You need sourdough culture for this. Cultivating sourdough is a commitment to carbs, people. You have to use it at least every third day, and feed it more flour and a bit of water after you've taken some from the bowl. You can freeze some of it for a few months (I froze mine for over a year, and it reactivated even better than before!). http://www.cowboyshowcase.com/sourdough.htm has the most basic starter recipe. I got mine from a vegan sourdough cookbook, although I'm not vegan, and this recipe is not vegan.

1 cup sourdough starter
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs (or egg substitutes)
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp vanilla

Mix all of these ingredients in a bowl, and try to make your arm hurt as you whip the fork around to get as much air into the batter as possible -- more air = lighter cake, and the albumen of the eggs is what holds the air. Now add the dry stuff:

2/3 cup cocoa powder
2 cups flour
2 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
SOME water

Mix until these ingredients are smooth, adding "some" water until it's a pourable ooze, not a biscuity paste.

Oil and flour your cake pans. I used 8" and 9" round circles to make the cat. Fill them halfway up, and pop them into a 350F oven for about 25-45 minutes. (I start checking on them at 25 minutes.) These cakes will not rise very much; that's the way I like it. This cake is also NOT screamingly sweet -- I saved that for the icing. (3c icing sugar, 1/2c soft butter, 1 tbsp vanilla, and "some" milk, beaten until spreading consistency.)

That's as specific as my recipes get. Enjoy! (Or not... like I said: it was panned by the birthday guests.)