So this is going to be a long blog entry with lots and lots and lots of pictures but as this cake was made for a contest I have decided to post the picture of the cake first and work on the blog over the week. So if you want to see the construction of this cake then check back over the next couple of days.
This cake was inspired by the My Little Pony episode MMmystery on the friendship express.
On the left is a compilation of what the cake looks like in the episode and on the right is our cake.
The cake is a minature version standing approximately 18 inches tall and completely made from scratch with proper French eclaire choux pastry and filled with ginger infused creme patissiere. The donuts are mini donuts made with a basic donut recipe (eggs, flour, sugar, blah blah blah). Each tier is a basic sponge cake and because there was no way I was going to be making a chocolate mousse moose Talia came up with the idea of sculpting a moose head out of tinfoil and then dipping it in chocolate.
I dont have a complete list of ingredients yet but we used over 20 eggs to make all of this.
Step 0: The idea.
So imaging that it is Sunday evening at 5pm. You have been wandering around the city all afternoon with friends, went to a movie, had some food, dropped by a comic store and then headed home. Dinner isn't made, food for the week isn't made, and you are exhausted from walking around. Now imaging that you get home and decide to take a brake and surf the net before you tackle getting food ready for the coming week.
On your wanderings around the net you drop by
Equestria Daily and right at the top is a link to a
cake decorating contest. The prize? An autographed BlueRay you already own and a movie poster. An interesting prize but nothing you cant live without. As a side thought you mention it to your girlfriend and say "I wish I had known about this earlier, I would have thought about making the cake from the MMMystery on the friendship express episode"... Her response.... "LETS DO IT!!!".
But first I had to make sure we had food for the week. Thankfully dinner doesn't take long and you can run over to the grocery store to get the extra ingredients you don't have. It's now 7pm on Sunday night. You have work in the morning. You normally get up at 6am to get to said job.
Step 1: The classic sponge.
3 Eggs
175g butter
175g sugar
a drop of vanilla for flavouring.
This part was actually made by Talia while I was making the eclaires. The recipe for this came from the sorted cookbook. For those of you that have never seen any of the sorted food recipes I highly suggest it
Sorted Homepage.
The ingredients show here are for a single batch of sponge. Talia ended up making 3 batches in order to get enough to make all 4 layers.
In this picture you can also see the containers we used for each tier. We didn't want to make it too large so we had to improvise when it came to the small cake tins.
For those that don't know how a sponge is made you basically take the room temperature butter and mix it really really well with the sugar. Then you add in the flour slowly and fold it all together until it is mixed
This batter then gets put into the "cake tins" and baked. I don't know if it was because the "cake tins" were made of glass or if our mini oven has wonky temperature but what was supposed to take 15 to 20 minutes ended up taking a lot longer than that. We actually had to add a tinfoil heat shield on top of the cakes in order to prevent them from burning.
This was repeated 3 times to make enough sponge for all 4 tiers
Score
| Ingredient |
Total Used (so far) |
| Eggs |
9 |
| Sugar |
525g |
| Butter |
525g |
| Flour |
175g |
Step 2: The Ecliars
Pastry
4 eggs
100g butter
125g flour
pinch of salt
Cream filling
7 Egg yolks
75g sugar
25g flour
500ml milk
4tsp corn starch
1tsp vannilla
Thumb sized ginger
While Talia was whipping up the sponge I was busy making the eclair batter and filling. Again the recipe came from
SortedFood. This recipe is actually 2 separate recipes. One for the dough batter and one for the cream filling.
In this picture you can see all the ingredients for the eclairs. the back 4 dishes are for the pastry and the front ones are all for the cream filling.
To make the pastry you start by melting the butter in 250ml of water.
Then you add the flour and mix well. Add each of the 4 eggs one at a time and mix completely before adding the next egg. This mixture then gets transferred into a piping bag and piped into the shape you want. Sadly I don't have any pictures of me doing this after going into the oven and baking until golden they come out looking like this:
When I was piping them I tried to make them in 2 different sizes (1 inch and 2 inch long) because I wasn't sure how big to make them. We ended up deciding on using the the larger ones which was actually a mistake because of the size of the cakes so we had to cut them all in half.
Interspersed with making the choux pastry I was also making the cream filling. To do this you have to mix the egg yolks, sugar and vanilla together then whisk in the flour and corn starch.
While you do this you are also bring the milk up to the boil (slowly or it will burn) with the grated ginger and simmer for 5 minutes. Now at this point I think I screwed something up because while I was dealing with other things the whole milk decided to curdle on me. I don't really know why this happened but my best guess is because I grated the ginger too finely and actually kind of juiced it.
Needless to say I did not use this and had to restart all over again. You may have noticed in the ingredients picture I started with a small carton of whole milk but as a result of this I had to use 2% milk instead. I didn't notice any difference.
So after (re-)simmering the milk you add the egg mixture and then put it back onto the heat until it is nice and thick.
I know this looks a LOT like the like the dough it is in fact the cream. This gets put into the fridge to cool and become nice and stiff.
Once all the ecliars were baked and cooled it was time to start decorating them with chocolate. I don't know exactly how much chocolate I used but it definitely not all the chocolate in the ingredients picture. It wasn't even half of that.
While the chocolate is melting over a boiling pot of water I had time to put open each eclair and fill with cream
Once the chocolate was melted and the eclairs filled it was just a matter of dipping each one in the chocolate and then putting them in the fridge to solidify.
Score
| Ingredient | Total Used (so far) |
|---|
| Eggs | 20 |
| Sugar | 600g |
| Butter | 625g |
| Flour |
325g |
Step 3: The donuts
1 cup flour (125g)
1/2 cup sugar (64g)
1 tbsp baking powder
1 egg
1/2 cups milk
1/2 tsp vanilla
4 tbsp oil
This was probably the easiest step of all as we have a little donut maker. The process of making them is basically beat all the ingredients together and then drizzle a table spoon into each mould and bake it for a couple of minutes.
In the past what I have done is simply dollop a tablespoon into the center of each mould but this ends up having a thin bit of flat batter in the center where the hole should be. So this time I tried using a "pancake pen". Its a neat little squeeze bottle that is specifically designed to squeezing out pancake batter into a pan so you can draw cool shapes.
Once all the donuts were all baked it was Talia's turn to start decorating (I was busy decorating the tiers). Using icing sugar and a little water Talia whipped up some cool colours of icing and started to decorate
Score
| Ingredient | Total Used (so far) |
|---|
| Eggs | 21 |
| Sugar | 728g |
| Butter | 625g |
| Flour | 389g |
Step 5: Decorating the tiers.
114g butter
228g sugar
For the icing I whipped up a super simple butter cream using a 2 to 1 ratio from sorted food. This was very dusty and it really looked like I had way too much sugar for the butter but after you mix it in really well it eventually does go smooth. I actually had to switch to a different bowl part way through making the butter cream because the sugar was just going everywhere.
Once the butter cream was nice and whipped together and Talia had added a couple drops of colour it was time to start decorating. Initially I started using a silicon spatula which was a complete mistake. After a while I switched to using one of my prep knives which really helped to get things done.
When the sponge bakes in the oven it rises so the first thing I had to do was cut off the top so I had a nice flat surface. Once that was done I could stack them all on top of each.
I should mention here that because we started so late in the evening we weren't able to get to a store that had cake tiers so Talia actually had to make the tier trays out of bristol board and cover then in aluminium foil.
I did the decorating from the smallest tier down the the largest tier.
This is the second smallest tier. Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of the other tiers after they were creamed.
By the time I got the largest tier finished I was very much running out of butter cream and I didn't want to make any more so the very bottom tier had only a very thin layer on it.
Score
| Ingredient | Total Used (so far) |
|---|
| Eggs | 21 |
| Sugar | 728g |
| Icing Sugar | 228g |
| Butter | 739g |
| Flour | 389g |
Step 6: The Moose Topper
This was entirely done by Talia. She crushed tinfoil into a moose shape than coated it in several layers of chocolate. Because of the nature of chocolate, when you melt it, it doesn't really return back to a solid state again so in order to completely hide the tinfoil the moose head had to go into the fridge to set between layers.
Step 7: Final Assembly
There really isn't much to say about this step, we started adding the donuts and eclairs to each tier and then inserted the columns for support.
As you can see in this last picture we finished construction at 2:45 am. We began this project at 7 pm with a quick shopping trip for eggs and other necessities and actually started baking around 7:45 pm
Final Score:
| Ingredient | Total Used | Imperial |
|---|
| Eggs | 21 |
|
| Combined Sugar + Icing | 956g | 2.1lb |
|
|
|
| Butter | 739g | 1.63lb |
| Flour | 389g | 0.86lb or 3 cups |
We spend about 8 hours making this cake.
We took a total of 189 pictures during the process
~(' ')~
