Prehistoric landscape cake

Well, it’s definitely been a crazy week of cakin’ it up here at Cake Town central: not only is this my busiest weekend of cake-making to date, all of them intricate designs with plenty of detail work, but it also happens to coincide with the first big heat wave of the summer, with temperatures rising up to the 40’s (Celsius, that is – if F it would be around 104 degrees). You don’t even want to know how hot it got in my kitchen, with the oven working overtime to produce some 18+ pounds of cake, or what a struggle it’s been trying to keep the buttercream from turning into soup.

But that’s not what you’re here for. Heatwave notwithstanding, a handful of wonderful kids celebrated their birthdays this week, and they wanted big, yummy, spectacular cakes for their parties. And I’m here to deliver!

First off, we have the prehistoric dinosaur-volcano cake, an impressive three-tiered affair with loads of landscape and creature details on the outside and luscious cake on the inside, topped with a volcano spouting lava all around.

Let’s begin with the cake itself: it is actually two tiers (the volcano is made out of fondant-covered rice crispy treats – more on that later), the bottom one being chocolate cake filled with ganache and covered in chocolate buttercream, and the top tier a simple vanilla cake smothered in home made strawberry jam and filled with vanilla buttercream and fresh strawberries.

We’ve made these cakes plenty of times before, but here’s a handy list of the recipes:

vanilla cake

chocolate cake

chocolate ganache

italian meringue buttercream

To make the cakes, start by lining your pans with parchments paper. In this case, I used two 9-inch round pans for the chocolate cake and two 7″ pans for the vanilla cake.

You can find directions for the chocolate cake here.
The steps are pretty much identical for both cakes – just substitute the cocoa powder and water for milk and bring your vanilla cake batter together just as you did the chocolate cake.

For the filling, I prepared some chocolate ganache (come on, you know the drill by now: just heat up some cream, chop some chocolate, pour the cream over the chocolate and allow it to sit for a couple of minutes before stirring until it becomes a uniform pool of chocolatey goodness) as well as a double batch of my failsafe italian meringue buttercream.

You can find step-by-step instructions here for both the vanilla and chocolate versions.

I reserved about half and combined it with the leftover chocolate ganache (which I used to fill the chocolate cake) instead of just adding melted chocolate, to produce a much fluffier chocolate buttercream.

To fill the vanilla cake, I started with a standard container of strawberries, which required a bit of prep: I sliced 2/3 of the berries into manageable chunks and used the rest to make a quick strawberry jam.

I blitzed the strawberries in a food processor, weighed them and placed them in a medium-sized pot, then weighed out an equal amount of sugar and dumped it all in the pot along with 1/4 cup of water. I let the sugary pulp come to a boil and allowed it to simmer until it reached a temperature of 105 C / 200 F. I squeezed in a couple of tablespoons of lemon juice, let it simmer for a minute and then removed from the heat and passed it through a sieve to remove the tiny seeds (this is totally optional, but it gives the jam a much finer texture in the cake).

The best part? You’ll have plenty leftover to enjoy on your breakfast toast.

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Now, for the decorations:

The original design for the cake called for a disosaur scene with an active volcano on top, and I knew the birthday boy was mostly excited about the lava spewing everywhere, so my first challenge was to try and replicate that.

I usually like to start a few days ahead, especially on busy weeks where I have to divide my attention between several cakes. Preparing your fondant pieces in advance not only guarantees a much more stress-free decorating process, but also allows you to work on the cake as close to delivery as possible, therefore ensuring a much fresher final product.

In this case, this was not only a good idea in terms of time management, but also a requisite for the volcano centerpiece.

I started by preparing a batch of rice crispy treats. The recipe for these is pretty standard, but I omit the butter whenever I want to use them for sculpting cake decorations:

Just melt 3 cups of marshmallows in a microwave safe bowl along with a tablespoon of water, stopping every few seconds to give the mixture a stir and ensure it doesn’t scorch. When completely melted, add 6 cups of rice crispies (I used cocoa puffs) into the mixture and stir used a well-lubed up spatula. Line your container of choice with parchment paper and lube that up with a bit of butter or shortnening, then add about 1/3 of your mixture in the container (I used a plastic tub of 1 kg fondant, about 5.5″ tall and 4.5″ wide at the base, with the sides curving slightly outward towards the top). Press firmly into the container, condensing the mixture as best you can, then add another 1/3 of the mixture and keep packing it in until it’s filled to the brim. Let your rice crispy treats set for a few hours and slice any overhang off the top to make it level, using a serrated knife.

When the rice crispies were set, I flipped them over so the widest part would be at the bottom and brushed piping gel all over the surface, to give the fondant something to stick to. I covered the entire thing with brown fondant and used several fondant tools (and even piping tips) to give it some texture. I used red, yellow and orange fondant to create the melting lava, and prepared a few teardrop-shaped balls of lava, which I attached to floral wire that I had previously painted in the coordinating colors. I also prepared the number 6 in fondant and attached it onto some floral wire as well, then proceeded to give the wire pieces a bit of a curve and stick them onto the volcano.

With that done, it was time to turn my attention to the actual cake decorations: I printed out some dinosaur images off the web, cut out the templates and used them to cut out the prehistoric creatures in several different shades of green fondant. I used brown and green powdered food coloring to give them some dimension and set them aside. After that, I cut out some hills and mountains out of green and brown fondant, and several pieces of leaves and tree trunks that would make up the palm trees.

When both my cakes were iced, I used white fondant with a bit of yellow mixed in to cover both cakes, but the original off-white surface seemed a bit flat as a backdrop, and I wanted to create the effect of a red sky to match the volcano them. Enter gel food coloring: I diluted a few dops of red, yellow and orange gel paste with some vodka and got to painting random horizontal lines across the fondant-covered cakes, focusing on the upper portion of the cake. I used a wet paper towel to dab some of the color off to make it seem less like a watercolor painting, and then started gluing the already prepared fondant pieces all around the two tiers.

And there you have it: an impressive prehistoric cake for an amazing 6 year old boy!

 

 

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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