Saturday, April 5, 2014

Ethan's Minecraft Cake

It's that time of year again - the Handsome Nephew Ethan's birthday and this year, he reached the ripe old age of eleven.  Where has that time gone?  Anyway, with age comes changing tastes in birthday cake requests and this was was an absolute beauty.  Along with his sister and cousin, he's pretty much obsessed with Minecraft and wanted a suitably appropriate cake.  But he didn't tell me this, instead his cousin Lulu mentioned it in passing and then produced a photo of what he had selected.  So, I had to get on with it and create a masterpiece.




Once I looked at the photo and broke it down into manageable chunks, it wasn't too difficult but it was time consuming.  The finished product takes two days : Day 1 to bake the cake and let it cool fully and Day 2 to make the buttercream, assemble the cake and decorate it.  A sharp knife was my best friend here for cutting the sheet of icing into straight lines.  Coloured icing would have been great but I was up for taking every shortcut possible, so I painted red gel colour onto the leftover white icing for the squares!

Ethan's Minecraft Cake

4 Large Eggs - separated
250ml cold Water
125ml Vegetable Oil
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
450g Plain Flour
50g Cornflour
1/2 tsp Salt
15g Baking Powder
375g Caster Sugar

300g Buttercream Icing (100g soft butter, 200g icing sugar, 1 tsp vanilla extract)
5 tbsp Raspberry Jam
1 sheet ready rolled Fondant Icing
Red food gel

Preheat your oven to 180c/Gas Mark 4.  Grease your cake tin & line it with baking paper.  I'm using a 9-inch square cake tin for Ethan's Minecraft Cake as it's all about the angles here.

In a mixer, beat the egg yolks, water, oil and vanilla together until light and fluffy.  This takes 2-3 minutes on a medium speed.  Sift all the dry ingredients together, add them to the egg yolk mixture and beat well.

In a separate bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff, then fold gently into the cake mixture, making sure the whites are well incorporated.

Pour the cake mixture into your tin and bake for 55-60 minutes until a skewer comes out clean.  Rest in the tin for 10 minutes before turning out onto a wire cooling rack.  Make sure the cake is completely cold before you attempt to decorate it.

Cut the cake in half, spread the bottom layer with the jam and 3/4 of the buttercream icing.  Sandwich the other layer on top.

Spread the remaining buttercream over the top of the cake, bringing it about 1cm over the sides.

Unroll the icing, and using the cake tin as a guide plus a 2cm overlap, use a sharp knife to cut out an icing square.  Keep the excess icing - don't throw it away as this will make your red decorations on top.

Cut 2-3 squares out from each side of the icing so you get an irregular pattern and then place the sheet of icing on top of the cake, smoothing down gently with your hands.  If any of the angles look a bit off, trim the icing with sharp scissors.

Now cut different sized squares using the leftover rolled icing.  Using a clean paintbrush (or a piece of icing). paint the squares with the red gel icing.  Allow to dry before randomly placing onto the iced cake, securing with a dab of buttercream.


And there you have it, a Minecraft cake fit for a birthday boy or girl.

2 comments:

  1. Just showed this to Aaron and he recognised what it was straight away!! He's another Minecraft nut!

    ReplyDelete