Superhero cake

I’ve wanted to dabble in the superhero genre again for a while now (last time I tried my hand at a Marvel character was the Hulk cake I made for my godson a couple of years ago) and was glad to be given the opportunity to do so when my friend asked for a birthday cake for her son who turned 5 this week.

The little guy had his heart set on a Batman and Superman cake, and, although a simple google search will yield plenty of variations on the same theme, I need to give credit where credit is due: I drew inspiration from this amazing creation, mostly because I preferred the skyline theme on the Batman cake to the bare Batman logo most cakes seem to favor.

The cake itself is my ever popular chocolate cake, layered with a cookies & cream filling.

I baked a double batch of my go-to chocolate cake recipe, prepared a double batch of my vanilla buttercream recipe and stirred 2 cups of Oreo cookie crumbs into 2/3 of the filling. I reserved a few Oreos, chopped them into bite sized pieces and sprinkled them onto each buttercream layer for some added crunch, then crumb-coated and final-coated the cake with the reserved buttercream.

To dress up the cake board, I rolled out some dark grey fontant, used a ruler to make the brick-like impressions and painted it with black gel food coloring mixed with a bit of vodka.

For the sound effect decorations on top of the cake, I started several days in advance to give them time to dry out. I rolled a thick layer of fondant, skewered it with a cake pop stick and cut the letters and shapes out of red and yellow buttercream using a template I printed out to size.

For the skyline on the Batman cake, I free-handed the various buildings out of black fondant, cut a LOT of small yellow squares and rectangles and used a template for the batman logo. I covered the bottom tier in light grey fondant and glue them on using piping gel thinned out with a bit of water.

The Spiderman cake was covered in red fondant. I used a sculpting tool to make the spider web impressions and painting them with a tiny brush dipped into black gel coloring. The spider is simply made out of a couple of small round disks of fondant and a few rolled out pieces to resemble the legs, glued onto the cake with piping gel.

Finally, I cut out fondant letter to spell the little boy’s name and the requisite ‘happy birthday’ message and added a small base for the candles, as the top of the cake is too crowded to fit them all in there.

The entire cake wasn’t particularly hard to make as long as you have the right tools, but it does take a lot of time and patience to decorate because there are plenty of details that need special attention.

 

About telethonrunner

I watch copious amounts of TV and write about it. I also watch movies and am ridiculously addicted to cooking shows.

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