Now, what you’re looking at is a fine example of the species of succulent known as Euphorbia Obesa. Yes, it’s just prime example of it’s kind… er. Sort of. I mean, it might be, if it wasn’t a cake.

That’s right; I said cake.

What you see before you is an delicious, sugary, highly unusual looking construction of brown sugar/rum/Kahlua cake, butterscotch syrup, brown butter cream cheese frosting, rice crispies, marshmallow, chocolate chips, modeling chocolate, and gumpaste. In other words, it’s basically pure sugar and fat.

*Sighs dreamily*

Isn’t it wonderful?

It might be a rather unusual choice for a cake, but the circumstances in which it were made, and so were the people that it was for. My brother, who is obsessed plants, succulents in particular, works at a conservatory. Now, he has two bosses, both of whom are awesome. One of them, who shall henceforth be known as Mr. E, asked me to make a cake for the other boss, Mrs. M,  since she’s kind of amazing, and it was her birthday. I did, but what I didn’t know was that it was his birthday two days later. Now, since it was during finals and I was taking organic chemistry, physics, history, and biology, I decided that it probably wasn’t the best idea to make him a cake when my sanity was already fraying at the edges and I had already made one cake, which was probably a horrible decision to start with.

The solution? Wait three weeks until my sanity had recovered (somewhat) and then randomly walk in with a surprise birthday cake. Because it just makes sense.

So, this was the result. A cake that looks like a succulent. And, yes, succulent, because it’s not a cactus, something that should apparently be known by all, according to my brother. He looked like a rather grumpy rabid baby owl-bear when I told him someone had called it a cactus. If that reference doesn’t make any sense, then google an owl-bear. And then squint and try to imagine it as a person. Kind of adorable, right? In a mutant sort of way. And now… Let us begin the creation!

First, you need marshmallows and rice crispies and, of course, butter.

You only need enough butter to grease your hands thoroughly, though, and the amount of rice crispies  and marshmallows you need will vary depending on how big you want to make your Euphorbia. That’s another great thing about this plant. There’s so much variation in it that even if your finished cake doesn’t look like that you meant for it to look, just scroll through google images, and you’ll probably find one that looks like yours.

Melt the marshmallows in the microwave, stirring frequently, until they’ve completely melted into a pile of viscous, delicious goop. Make sure there’s no lumps of un-melted marshmallow. Then, add enough rice crispies to coat them all thoroughly.

I, sadly, ran out of rice crispies, so this is a bit heavy on the marshmallow. Then, grease your hands with the butter, and grab a chunk of the rather unattractive looking mixture when it’s still warm, and mold it into a ball, pressing tightly. I made mine the side of a baseball, roughly. Set it aside to cool and solidify. If you have any left over marshmallow mixture… you can eat it, obviously. You know, since you don’t want to be wasteful or anything.

Next, you need to make modeling chocolate. It’s like sweet, chocolately clay.

This is what it’s going to look like when it’s done, but then you need to knead it, just a little, until it’s soft and malleable. After that, tint it a pale green with food coloring for the base color of the succulent (not cactus).

After that, roll it out, keeping it fairly thick, and lay it over the now firm ball of rice crispies and marshmallow, pressing it down onto the ball gently but firmly.

Please ignore the fact that it looks more like something from Alien and is about to pop open and attach itself to your face at any moment than something you want to eat. Create the marks by pretty the back of a knife into the modeling chocolate, making sure not to go through the chocolate layer.

Next, use the flat side of a knife to shape the individual sections of the alien egg sack - I mean, plant.

After much fiddling and pressing and after the bottom’s been trimmed off, it should look something like this… thing. I’m not actually sure what to liken it to. Any suggestions?

Anyway, after that, it needs little ridgy… bumpy things. Basically, you just need to spend far too much time with a pointy object molding the edge into bumps. I found it works best if the tool you’re using has a flat tip and to press it in and angle it downwards before messing about making the bump. And I just reread that last sentence. It sounds highly sketchy. After that, it just needs to be painted. I used food coloring powder to give it striations.

But, even after all of that fiddling and pressing and coloring, it’s still not done. Nope. Time for highly mutant looking flowers! Color some modeling chocolate and then pinch off a piece around the size of the flowers. Roll it so that it tapers to a point on one end, and then use something, the long side of a tooth pick will work, to make three indentations, and then, on each of the three parts, make a thin, light line with a knife. Then, poke a hole in the end. Like this.

Next, I used some yellow modeling chocolate to make the stamens… or stigmas. I always get those confused. Like stalactites and stalagmites. Anyway, make them, and then shove the pointed end in the hole, making sure that it’s securely in there. And, if my brother was here, he’d be making a “that’s what she said” joke. But, since he’s not, we can all be mature adults about it… Hee hee. I made my stamen/stigmas tri-pronged, like the real flowers, so it turned out looking like this.

Repeat until you’ve got a bunch of them in varying sizes, and add in shading with powered colors.

Once there’s enough, press the bases together firmly to make one flower cluster, and cut off the bottom so that it’s fairly flat before pressing it to the cake.

And then… it was time for the cake. I used one of my favorite cake recipes with just a few minor adjustments, like… doubling the alcohol by adding two teaspoons of Kahlua and a teaspoon of silver rum. This is also one of the only cakes that my brother loves, since he doesn’t really like sweets that much, another reason that I consider the fact he’s an alien.
http://www.marthastewart.com/356040/butterscotch-pecan-cake

I used the cake part as well as the butterscotch syrup… which I totally didn’t eat with a spoon at any point in time… DON’T JUDGE ME!

I mean…  ummm… Look! Cake!

I just baked the cake in two eight inch pans, which did alter the baking time, making it take a bit longer, so I lowered the temperature fifteen degrees or so. It’s rather hard to tell on our oven, since it perpetually seems to cook 25 degrees too hot. Then, I just took some off of the sides, tapering it slightly towards the base to get a rounded, pot look. This is just the two cakes stacked on top of each other while I carved them. After getting it carved, I sliced each of the layers in half for a total of four layers before adding the sweet, wonderful goodness that is… butterscotch syrup.

*sniff* Isn’t it one of the most beautiful things you’ve ever seen? On top of this, if you manage not to crack and eat it, put a thin layer of cream cheese icing, or the icing of your choice. Drizzle the syrup over the next layer of cake, and then put it drizzle side down onto your first layer, so it goes cake, syrup, icing, syrup, cake… Repeat until you have just placed the final piece on top. Don’t apply the syrup to the outside, but instead just cover the cake in icing. I don’t have picture of this step because, well… it really didn’t look appetizing.

Let’s move on to something prettier, shall we?

Color your modeling chocolate whatever color you want the pot to be. I chose blue. One, because it’s pretty, and, two, because I was tired of making terra cotta colored pots. Measure how long you’ll need to roll it by taking a piece of string and laying it around the base of the cake, make it big enough that you can see it all around when looking at the cake from above. Also measure how tall the cake is. Now, roll it out! Make sure to leave yourself ample wiggle room on this. An inch or so on top is a good amount. When I did that, after several frustrating mishaps, I found that rolling it sandwiched between two pieces of saran wrap worked well. Peel off the saran wrap from one side, the one with the more imperfections and wrinkles, and then cut a straight line on one of the long sides, cutting off just enough to make it straight. This is going to be the side that goes down, the bottom edge of your pot. Next, just carefully press the sheet of modeling chocolate to the side of the cake, wrapping it around. After that’s in place, cut off your extra from the side neatly, so that your seam doesn’t look too messy. Trim the top off evenly, still leaving at much as you can, and then fold it over to create a rim. At this point, it should look vaguely like this.

I had the smallest bit of extra modelling chocolate, so I made a ring around the base to cover up the seam. It was at this point that I realized that I had run out of modelling chocolate to cover the top. So… I improvised. What tastes delicious and looks sort of like rocks? Chocolate, of course!

I just chopped up a couple of handfuls of milk chocolate chips and scattered them on top. Now, the succulent (still not a cactus) goes on top.

Of course, the rocks still kind of look like chocolate chips, so there needs to be more decorating… and sugar. Obviously.

I just took out a piece of gumpaste and left it out to dry (I’d done this the night before). As it hardens, it gets all rough-looking when you cut it up, with jagged edges, which, once you color it, makes it look like rocks, which, for some reason, people seem to go gaga over.

I did a few varying colors and and arrange them on top. And then, finally… it was finished!

Feast your eyes (literally?) upon the succulent (still not a cactus) cake!

There’s the final product, a Euphorbia Obesa made out of sugar. I’m happy to say that Mr. E liked it. A lot. I really do love cake, and now that this one’s done… I’m going to make a friend’s birthday cake. I’m thinking origami themed. You know, if I can figure out how to do origami that’s edible and actually tastes good.

Anyway, let me know if you guys (if anyone actually reads this long, long thing) liked the cake.

I seem to be making cakes for birthdays a week late. Consistently. But, somehow, the recipients of said cakes don’t seem to mind.

Last quarter I met a girl in biology lab and we bonded over our mutual dislike (I could use another word here, but dislike is politer) of biology. I’ve heard that the surest way to bring two people together is hatred of a third. That proved extremely accurate in this case.

It was her birthday last week, so I decided, because I had no idea what to get her, and also because I just really like making cakes, that I would make her a cake. She told me I didn’t have to. I told her I knew that but I was going to anyway.

After deciding that I was going to make her a cake, I had to decide on a theme. What does she like? Origami. And tea. Great! Let’s make a tea flavored origami box cake! Because, to my brain, that just somehow makes sense, despite the fact I’ve never seen an origami cake or that I never made a tea flavored cake.

So, this was my attempt to make a (hopefully) awesome cake for a really cool girl. Happy (late) birthday.

Aaand… All of that led to this:

*Cue me searching online on how to make edible origami and then rejecting all methods I find*

The whole process was actually simpler than I imagined. For the cake itself, I used this Earl Grey Tea cupcake Recipe.

For the icing, I used this modified Swiss buttercream recipe, which I just found and makes amazingly fluffy frosting. It’s probably my favorite at this point, despite the fact that I’m usually an all-butter girl, and it has just a bit of shortening in it.

But I was sort of worried that it wouldn’t have enough of a tea flavor, so I decided to add more sugar flavor by adding an Earl Grey tea sugar syrup. Despite all of this, the tea still has a subtle, gentle tea flavor.

For the outside, I used the same modelling chocolate recipe that I used in my tutorial on how to make a Euphorbia Obesa cake.

Now… Allez cuisine! I’ve been watching too much Iron chef. And we’re not really cooking so much as baking, so… Allez jouer avec du sucre! Yep. So much more accurate.

Before you even start to make the cake, you need to make the modelling chocolate the day before. Follow the recipe, and let it sit overnight.

Also, don’t forget to make the syrup! I just took half a cup of sugar and half a cup of water  and brought it so a boil, dissolving the sugar crystals, along with a generous amount of Earl Grey tea leaves. Then, let it cool and strain out the leaves. It turns this beautiful amber color.

Now, you can work on the cake. After making the batter for the cake, I baked it in two pans. I had one hexagon one, which I think was roughly six inches, and a six inch round. The batter fills them up nicely, but they’re going to take a bit more time to cook than it says in the recipe. The hexagon took around 24 minutes, and the round about thirty.

Once they’re cool,  level them off so that they’ll fit together nicely. As for the scraps… Well, you do have to do a taste test, right? Quality control and all of that.

And then stack them!

Next, you need to cut the round to the same shape as the hexagon. To do this, just place the hexagon on top of the round and cut straight down along the sides. After that, I cut each layer into two, so that I had a total of four layers.

Time to make super fluffy frosting. It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die! Movie quote anyone?

Take the syrup and drizzle it over each layer, adding enough to moisten the cake, but not to make it wet, and then cover with a generous portion of frosting. Repeat! And again! And again!!!

Cover the entire cake in frosting. Make sure to keep the hexagonal shape and not to round it out too much. Chill while you prepare everything else.

Take modelling chocolate and knead it briefly until malleable. Set aside around a quarter of it to keep white. The majority of it’s going to be colored blue, but make sure to take piece and color it pink, and then another and color it yellow. The proportions shown in the next picture are about right.

And here we go! Time to really get to work.

First, on top of a piece of saran wrap, roll out your blue until fairly thin, and making sure that it’s wider than the side of your cake. Leave yourself a good half inch of wiggle room. Cut the bottom in a straight line. Make sure that you have a lot of this, more than just enough for the side, because it’s going to be used on the top, too.

After rolling out the pink as thin as you possibly can, cut out little flower blossoms with the smallest flower cutter you have. And then repeat until you really, really don’t want to do it anymore. And then do some more. It’s really important that the chocolate is rolled thinly in this part, because otherwise they’re going to lose their shape when you roll them onto the blue.

Sprinkle them randomly onto the blue.

Now, just because you don’t have any biology homework, or physics homework, or a organic chemistry midterm to study for, take way too long rolling out little yellow stamen-thingies for the centers of each flower. Yeah… my time management skills are sorely lacking. I’ve heard some pretty odd ways to procrastinate. Mine is baking. I knew someone else who cleaned her toaster to procrastinate. To each their own, I suppose?

Now, take a piece of saran wrap and place it over the modelling chocolate, making sure to keep it as wrinkle-free as you can. Take your rolling pin and roll down over it super gently, just enough to merge the flowers into the blue.

It should look vaguely like this.

Time to cover the cake! To do this, peel off the saran wrap on the side that doesn’t have flowers and press it gently to the side of the cake. When you’ve gone all the way around it, have the seam on a corner. It’s easier to cover up that way, and make sure to make it nice and straight. A little blending with a finger should make it all but disappear. Crease the corners of the cake slightly with your fingers so that the angles and edges aren’t lost, and then trim the chocolate off of the top, cutting it almost level with the icing. Closer than what I did in the picture.

Add a strip of white the top of the cake. I think I made mine around half the height of the cake.

Here’s where it just gets slightly more complicated. Take a piece of the blue with flowers and cut it to fit the side of the cake with a piece overlapping on top, and with a corner to show the white underneath. I know I’m not explaining thing too well, but hopefully the two pictures above will explain. Do this for all six sides.

Trim the chocolate so that there’s no blue-on-blue overlap. Next, cut out white isosceles triangles (I know, I know. You thought you never needed to think about geometry again. Sorry.) and place them over the seams like so. Then, cut out a white hexagon, keeping the modelling chocolate around double the thickness of the modelling chocolate that covered the cake. Make sure that it’s big enough to cover the unsightly seams on the center.

To get the paper folding look, take strips of the blue chocolate, half as wide as the sides of the hexagon, and align them so that they’re pointed towards the center of the cake, each one overlapping the last strip, and with the outer ends tucked under the white hexagon.

Congratulations! You’re finished!

Except… not really. Sorry. The main construction is done, and now it’s time for the detail work.

Outline the flowers with gold food-grade paint, which is available online or at some stores that carry Wilton products and draw some stems coming off of them.

Finally, add some pink touches to the flowers with a dry brush and some red food colored touches to give depth. See how fancy it sounds? And it looks fancy, too!

Now, ‘tis finally finished. There’s nothing more I could possibly add to make it better.
I lied. There is.
Have an edible origami crane!

Awesome increased by 20%. Sadly, I forgot to take pictures of the process to make it, but I will post a modelling chocolate origami crane tutorial eventually.

There’s the finished product. An origami box with crane that’s all edible for a friends birthday.

I hope anyone who actually reads my food ramblings enjoyed this tutorial. And now… off to study physics.

So… This isn’t really a cake tutorial. Midterms are being mean to me, so I haven’t had time to make another one. Although…. I am working on a pain au chocolate that takes four days.

Anyway, I have some pictures of cakes that I made before I made a tumblr account and realized that I should take pictures of each of the steps. This is one of them.

I made this cake for one of my most favorite neighbors, since it was her birthday.

And I actually gave it to her on her birthday! No two week late procrastination! Which… was probably because it was Spring break.

What? Don’t judge. How else would I spend my Spring break?

Anyway, it was her birthday, and she wanted a Louis Vuitton purse cake, an Alma GM Louis Vuitton purse cake, to be exact, and I was more than happy to try to make it for her

But, before I list all of the absolutely lovely sugary bits that went into making it… Guess how much a real one costs? Go on. No? Well… how about 3,150$?

Yeah. That’s the face I made when I saw the price tag, too.

Frankly, I’d rather have the cake. At least it tastes good. SUGAR!

Moving on… The cake itself is the fabulous and wildly popular chocolate cake recipe by Ina Garten, Aunt Beatty’s Chocolate Cake. So good… I used Swiss Meringue buttercream for the icing, and the outside is marshmallow fondant! I thought about trying to add up the calories that would be in a piece of this, but… I decided I really didn’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss, right? 

The first thing to be done is to make the decorations that need to dry before they’re applied, which would be the gumpaste parts.

I just used gumpaste and covered them with gold powder. Not shown in the picture, but necessary to making the cake is the gumpaste horseshoe shapes that need to be made ahead of time for the handles. Basically, it’s just two ropes of gumpaste curved into the right shape. It’s what makes the handles stand up.

After that, make the marshmallow fondant and let it sit overnight. The majority of it is going to be for the white base of the cake, but some of it needs to be held back for the tan parts of the cake.

Then, you need to bake the cake, and I used double the recipe, I think… or triple. It was a lot of cake. It’s better to bake them in square or rectangular cake pans, too. 

Next, with a ruler, or by eye, measure the dimensions of the cake, and try to cut rectangles of the cake that roughly follow the measurements. Stack them with icing in between, and then smooth out the sides, cutting off excess cake. The shape is really just a really long, slightly rounded triangle, which, sadly, you can’t really see in any of the pictures that I took, but just look online. There are tons of reference pictures.

For stability, stick two skewers right down through the top of the cake, and make sure that they’re a good inch shorter than the cake, because the cake is going to settle, and then there will be wooden skewers sticking out and… it’s just not good. Trust me, I speak from experience.

Then, I frosted the outside and put it in the fridge to chill while I rolled out my marshmallow fondant. Make sure that it’s big enough (super important), and then drape it over the top, smoothing out any fold, and pinching it together on the two ends to form the seams. Trim off any extra.

Time for decorations! The zipper is just a piece of gumpaste with a tool run over it to make it look like a zipper. The handles are a little more difficult, because the gumpaste centers need to be wrapped in the tan marshmallow fondant, and then that piece connected to the golden gumpaste rings, which is in turn connected to a cut out of the tan again. Right next to the zipper, on either side, make a faint impression all along it. Slightly dampen the back of the tan cut out that hangs off of the golden square ring. Settle the ends one of the fondant covered gumpaste handles onto the impression/ridge on the side of the zipper, and then press the damp cut out onto the cake. Repeat the same process for the other side while not letting go of the first one but keeping the handle upright. It really, really helps if you have someone to hold the first one while the second one is getting down. Then, press the handles together lightly, balancing them, and tie them together with a piece of string to let them set up.

Everything else is fairly simple and can be seem in the photographs. Make the strip across the bottom and add the studs all over the purse dusting them with gold, fold a piece of white fondant for the little pocket and the tan strip that goes across it, cut out a piece of the tan for the little tag. Then, apply the hardened gumpaste pieces with a bit of water. I poked little holes in the tan to simulate stitching, too.

Finally… begin the laborious task of drawing the pattern on with food-grade markers. It only took me, you know, a couple of hours? No more than four and probably closer to three, but I am pretty slow. In the beginning, I used a template, just to show me the spacing of the pattern, but then I just did it free-hand.

FINISHED! It came out looking like this.

Ta da! I’m rather proud of this cake, and, more importantly, the wonderful woman for who it was for? She loved it. Yays!

My brother’s birthday was recently, and I decided to make him a cake. Now, that’s nothing unusual in itself, but… I think the cake be.

Has anyone seen Owls of Ga'hoole? That’s sort of what this reminds me of, but, you know… Just with less blood-purity and superior races and more chocolate.

Right. Moving on.

My brother, as far as I can see, has three great obsession in his life: Succulents, birds, and, most recently, rock climbing. So, I decided to make him a Barn owl cake, which just happens to be one of his (and my) favorite birds. It only took me like… three days, which is the most I’ve ever spent on a cake, but I think it was worth it. It’s my favorite cake that I’ve ever made.

It only took… Three batches of this cake recipe, a batch of chocolate ganache icing, and three 12 oz batches of white modelling chocolate.

I recommend making an extra batch of the chocolate ganache, as I was literally scraping the bottom of the bowl, trying to get every bit I could out. And… it might not be a horrible idea to make a fourth batch of the modelling chocolate. That’s right, a fourth batch.

Also, for the cake recipe, I didn’t use creme de casis, since my brother doesn’t really like it, but I used creme de cacao in the batch I doubled and kahlua in the other. Kahlua wins. Out of every liqueur I’ve used in this cake recipe so far, it’s the best… and the cheapest.

I made two eight inch cakes, four six inch cakes, and two five inch cakes.

Once I had my cakes baked, it was time to enlist some help. I’m not good with carpentry. Or tools. Or anything like that at all. The one time I tried to make a picture frame, I wound up sawing my finger instead of the wood, and the only mechanical thing that I’ve ever built was a catapult made out of pencils and rubber bands. Needless to say, I asked someone else to build the cake base for me.

This is just a board with a dowel, which you have to make sure is shorter than your cake is going to be, screwed into it, covered with foil, and then parchment strips laid in a rough outline of the cake. Make the dowel a good inch or two shorter than your cake is going to be because the cake is going to settle, AKA get shorter, and if the dowel is too long… it’s going to poke out the top of the cake. Yep. I speak from experience.

Cut three sections of dowel that are slightly shorter than two of your six inch cakes stacked on top of each other, after they’ve been leveled.

Push the two cakes onto the dowel and then push the three smaller dowels into a small triangle through the cakes.

Cut an oval of food grade cardboard into an oval like so, fitting it over the dowel and letting it go to the edge. That’s going to be where the tail of the owl will be.

Then, the eight inch cakes are stacked on. I cut them so that they’re longer in the back, to for the butt and tail, and smaller on the other sides. These layers are going to be the base of the owl.

Aaaaand… Keep stacking! Add the two other 6 inch cakes, putting them off center, so the cake sort of curves, and top the structure with the two five inch cakes.

Carve it until it loosely resembles an owl. Keep checking with a reference picture to make sure that the shape looks right. It’s best to do this with a sharp, serrated knife. Like a bread knife. Now, as you can see, I still have the parchment on the cakes. I leave it while I’m arranging everything because it makes it less likely that a cake piece is going to break.

Here’s the whole thing reassembled with the parchment removed and chocolate ganache in its place. I used some cake scraps and stuck them on with ganache where I needed to change the shape.

This is what it looks like after coating the entire cake in a thin layer of chocolate ganache. Try to get it as smooth as possible. At this point, it looks rather like a very bad carving of a big-headed chicken. I swear it will get better. Chill it in the fridge.

Roll out a big piece of the white modelling chocolate and cover the cake, starting at the front so that it’s smooth. I used a brown/grey tinted covering for the base, which will be the stump. Now, due to the fact that the cake is a weird, uneven shape…

… The back of the cake isn’t nearly so pretty looking. In fact, it more resembles Frankenstein’s monster. Just try and make it as neat and smooth as you can.

It looks a little better after smoothing it down. Taking the flat blade of a knife, after warming it in hot water, works really well to smooth the joins.

Time to start on one of the most important aspects of this cake. The face.  A barn owl’s eye are deep-set, so I had to add quite a bit of modelling chocolate to build the features. Keep adding chocolate until the depth looks right.

Then start working in the details, like the eyes and the beak.

See? This is what it looked like after some more carving. Make sure to give it a lot of text to simulate the feathers. And pay special attention to the direction that they go.

Ta dah!

Onto the chest! Add some modelling chocolate where you want it to be extra fluffy, but make sure you mark the entire chest.

And… I sort of skipped photographing a few steps, so… Yeah. Sorry. I got distracted. Anyway, the tail is just five overlapping pieces of the modelling chocolate that was secured to the butt of the owl.

How the wings look are going to vary with the picture of the owl that the cake is being based on, but, for this one, I just layered five pieces of the modelling chocolate, after cutting them into the right shape, and layered more pieces over that, as seen in the picture. What’s very important here is looking at your picture. LOOK AT IT! And then try to copy it. Remember, you’re going to have to make the wings twice basically, once for each side.

Once again copying the picture to the best of my ability, I laid down a piece that went all the way across the back, covering any seams from the additions of the other feathers, and then added a central piece in the middle of that, which sort of looks like a flat little hood hanging down. I also gave them semi-scalloped edges, to mimic feathers.

And don’t forget to make the talons, attaching them securely to the body. Take a bit of the white modelling chocolate and put it around the join, using the extra material to make it look super fluffy.

Draw feather-like markings on the modelling chocolate.

And more feather markings. Actually, make sure you feather or fuzz everything.

And more feather markings. I serrated the front edge of the feathers that hang straight down to copy the real thing. Apparently, that’s what makes them fly so silently.

Don’t forget to add texture to the post that the owl is sitting on. I found a couple of pictures of weathered posts online and used those as inspiration.

Make sure you do the top of the stump/post/log thing, too, and use more modelling chocolate to blend out the fuzz from the owl into the post slightly.

And here’s what it should looks like. Vaguely. I rather like it like this. It looks like a statue. But now… It’s time for a paint job.

I added black food dye to some melted white chocolate and painted it on the eyes, making sure to leave some white so the eye looks like it’s gleaming.

After that, I painted a mix of red, brown, and orange powdered food coloring around the eyes and then down alongside the poofed out feathers and beak. It sort of looks like it’s crying blood, but this is actually what they look like.

Then I painted the beak a pale pink, making it slightly darker towards the tip. Oddly enough, I think the beak might be my favorite part of this entire cake. It’s just so cute! Not weird. Not weird at all.

The paint job is going to vary, depending on the bird that you’re using as a model. They vary in pattern and coloration hugely. I used a mixture of brown, orange, and yellow powdered food coloring, mixing a small amount of water in with the brown to form a paste to get the dark brown seen on the edges.

Using more of the dry food coloring and paint the patterns on the wings.

After that, you can start to apply a darker brown.

To add the dots, just I just mixed the black food coloring powder with a little water and dotted it on with a brush.

Finally, I added some white melted chocolate to give it white spots.

And this is how the paint job looked in the end! It only took me… far too long.

I used brown powder on the feet and water and black food coloring on the talons themselves.

I also added some brown food coloring to the post, taking a brush and emphasizing the texture by running the brush in the “cracks”.
And so… There you have it.

Alright. I’m done spamming this post with owl pictures.

Okay, now I am. I swear. Well… Just one more.

There. Sorry. I’m just sort of ridiculously in love with this cake. She’s so cute! And so real looking. Yeah… I started talking to it at one point. Because I talk to the things I cook sometimes, which is totally normal. My mother started laughing. Meh.

Aaaaanyway, I really hope that you enjoyed this far, far too long tutorial, and, if you did, please leave a comment and let me know!

Behold! The fearsome and dangerous tarantula… cake.

Okay, so maybe it’s not so fearsome or dangerous unless you’re afraid of chocolate cake in the shape of an arachnid, or learning how to make one, but still - behold!

I made this cake for my best friend and boyfriend, to celebrate them getting jobs. I’m not entirely too sure how a tarantula was appropriate, but I don’t think they minded too much. I mean, it’s free chocolate cake… in the shape of a tarantula. And, to my surprise, it wasn’t just them who liked it.

My neighbor, across the street, the same woman I made the purse cake for, has a daughter. She, after one look at the cake, declared it adorable, named it “Tarantuly” (Despite the fact that it was named Aragog II by my brother and I, and named Bob by my best friend.), and said that she wanted one just like it for her birthday… which is themed “Shopping in Paris.” I’m not entirely sure how they fit together. At all. There were suggestions of a giant tarantula climbing the Eiffel Tower, though. That will probably not be happening.

The first thing I thought of when I made it was Aragog, from Harry Potter. Or Shelob from Lord of the rings, although, granted, I think she was just a spider, not a tarantula. And, only later did a friend suggest that I should have made a mini-Frodo to go with the cake. It would have been so cool! Argh. Well, maybe next time.

It also reminded me of Eight Legged Freaks, the one spider horror movie I have seen. And, after googling that, I found that there actually was a movie made called Tarantula. Tag line? Science’s Deadliest Accident. I think The Kitchen’s Deadliest Accident is more appropriate here. I mean, if we’re talking about going into a food coma from eating the entire modeling chocolate covered creme de cassis spiked chocolate cake.

What was that? Yes, you did hear me right. The cake has creme de cassis in it, meaning it’s alcoholic. Pshaw! Just when you thought it couldn’t get any better. Did I also mention that the cake is COMPLETELY edible? As in even the legs. I don’t like using non-edible components in my cakes, even though wire and Styrofoam are kind of stapes in professional bakeries where they do this sort of thing, not to mention PVC pipe, so the legs are made out of modelling chocolate wrapped around hard candy sticks. Uh huh. More sugar = more better.

And, now, without further babbling… Let’s make this thing.

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You’re going to need to start this project the day before.

First, make two batches of the modelling chocolate found here. It’s the only recipe I’ve found that actual works for me. And, if you can find it, use this stuff.

I don’t know what they do to the chocolate, but I do know that it’s just so easy to work with. I lub it. I lurve it. I love it. Right… Moving on. Make two batches of the stuff

And there we go. Done. Now, let it sit over night. Time to make the cake.
I used this recipe, which I sort of decided that I had to make because it called for creme de cassis, and the liqueur is one of the few that Hercule Poirot, Belgian (not French!) detective extraordinaire drinks.

So, to - I’m sorry, what? You don’t know who I’m talking about?

O_O

Stop making me sad. Go to the library and get a book by Agatha Christie, one of the ones where Poirot is the main character. Or, if you don’t want to read, go on Netflix and watch the television series. Go ahead, watch some of it while the cake is baking. The not knowing of Poirot is must be rectified.

The recipe was just enough to pour into two 6-inch cake pans, a five-inch, and a four-inch. Of course, if those size cake pans aren’t available, you can just use what you have and cut it to size. The times on the cakes will vary a bit from the real recipe, since the cakes themselves are smaller. Let them cool, unmold, and wrap in plastic wrap to use the next day.

Day 2

First things first. Make the chocolate ganache. I opted for a ganache instead of the usual Italian meringue buttercream I use because I wanted something more stable. Although, in hindsight, I think the buttercream would have worked perfectly well.
Now, onto the carving.

Cut off the tops of one of the six-inch and the five-inch cakes so that they’re level, and then stack the six-inch on the six-inch and the four-inch on the five-inch. The stack of six-inch cakes will be the body of the tarantula, and the smaller stack the head.

After pushing the smallest cake to the side so that one of the sides align, cut a slightly curved piece off of the smaller stack of cakes so that it will fit closely with the six-inch stack. Using a reference picture, cut the body of the spider to the right shape. It’s going to vary depending what sort you decide to make. Mine had an oval body, so I cut an oval.

This is when you’re going to need to cut the head shape as well. Just try to approximate whatever your reference picture looks like. And, please, don’t try and do this without one. I mean, unless you’re already an expert on tarantulas or something.

As you can see in the picture, I didn’t remove the piece of parchment paper that I used to line the cake pan with when I baked the cake. I do this because I’ve had difficulty in the past where the cakes actually stuck to each other before I even put any icing and ripped when I tried to separate them. I’ll remove it later, after the final carving. So, after you have the basic shape of the tarantula, you start rounding it, so make it look like the real thing. Try and get it really rounded on the bottom so that it doesn’t really even look like it’s lying flat on the table anymore. You do this by carefully cutting inwards towards the cake, and it should look something like the picture above when done.

Clean it up a little, and.. there. See? And now it’s time to assemble it!

What you’re looking at is just a piece of plywood that’s been covered with aluminum foil, making sure to cover the whole thing. And then I just took strips of parchment paper and laid them in a rough, overlapping, outline of the spider cake. This is so that that foil doesn’t get too messed up with frosting and crumbs.

Place the bottom layers of the cake on the board and smear a generous portion of the ganache frosting over it.

Place the top layers back on, making sure to line up the edges of the cakes.

Cover the rest of the cake in the frosting, trying to get it as smooth as possible. Then, put the whole thing in the fridge.

While the cake is chilling, roll out the modelling chocolate, making sure it’s big enough. I covered the cake in two sections, the head and the body, to make things easier.

The great thing about modelling chocolate, besides the taste and flexibility of the material, is the you can blend joins quite nicely. Try and smooth down  the modelling chocolate to make it as, well, smooth as possible. There’s going to be some folds towards the lower part of the cake. Just smooth these out with your fingers and then cut off the excess chocolate. I know the picture about doesn’t look too pretty, but it’ll get better. Or worse, depending on how you feel about tarantulas.

Now it’s time to build the legs. For the bones of them, I used hard candy sticks, broken into pieces, using a serrated knife. Looking at your reference pictures, break/cut the sticks into as many pieces of whatever length you need to be proportional to the body of your spider.

Stick together the pieces (I used five of them for each leg) with balls of modelling chocolate and then smear it over the joins, arranging it in the shape that matches, once again, your reference picture.

Then, after rolling out a piece of the modelling chocolate, cover the candy sticks with it. My tarantula had overlapping pieces that stuck out at the joins, so I just made them by pinching and smearing it. Now, stick it in the freezer briefly to solidify it. After it’s hard, take a large ball of modelling chocolate and attach it to the body of the cake firmly and securely. It doesn’t matter if it looks a little messy. The main point of this is just to get the leg securely attached.

Once they’re attached, the legs will look like this. And.. I sort of skipped photographing a few steps because I got distracted, but the small leg-looking like things in the front, that I think is to help it feed?, I made out of pure modelling chocolate, and the same with the fangs in front, which are those thick things that look vaguely like two teeth. I also added a rope of the chocolate over those, and a piece that I smeared on the top of the head. All of these will depend on what type of tarantula/spider chosen to make.

Here’s a close up. Then, I smoothed down the piece I added on top of his head, so that it was a triangular, faintly raised area.

Poke indents in the modelling chocolate and then roll small balls to place into the holes. Make they they stick out and are slightly protuberant. And, just like legs, they have eight eyes, although, apparently, their eyesight is pretty bad. Weird.

Take a paring knife and draw it across the modelling chocolate legs, over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and… I think you get the point. Do it all over the legs, making sure not to cut too deep, to make it look like the legs are hairy.

For the body of the spider (not the head), I made much longer cuts, which give the impression of longer hair.

The hairs on the fangs I made an intermediate size, and the hair right above it I made really furry looking by twisting the knife slightly while I did it. Once again, try to copy how the hair is on your reference picture.

On the head, I made the hair short. Pay attention, too, to the grain of the hair.

When you’re done with this step, it should look roughly like this. Oh, and for the spinnerets, those things sticking off of its behind? I just rolled two slightly tapered pieces of modelling chocolate, pressed two indents all the way around each, to make them look segmented, and attached them.

Now, it’s time for a paint job. Melt some white chocolate (I used the white chocolate version of the chips I used for the modelling chocolate) and add food coloring until it’s the desired color. Then, using a paintbrush, paint it on the modelling chocolate.

After the orange coat cooled and hardened, I added a some white melted chocolate to the end of the leg segments.

For the long hairs on the body of the tarantula, I painted some white melted chocolate along the hairs and then quickly wiped it off, which left some of the white chocolate in the cuts I had made earlier, highlighting them.

Then… I cut hairs again where I had painted the cake with the melted chocolate to get the hair-like look again.

And this is what his face looks like. Truly, only a face a mother could love. I only did a thin coat of the orange /brown melted chocolate on the fangs. Oh! And don’t forget to do the eyes. I mixed black food coloring with melted chocolate and painted it on. To give him a gleam in his eye and make him look intelligent, I added a little white spot off to the side on each eye, like light was reflecting.
And… Believe it or now, it’s done. After all of that work, the finished product looks like this.

It’s getting closer…

*Cue overly dramatic and feminine terrified scream made adorable by anime*

Kyyyyyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

And there you have it, a completely edible tarantula. I mean, not to say that tarantula’s aren’t edible, because I know people eat them, but… I think mine might taste better. Maybe?

Aaaaanyway, I hope anyone who actually reads this liked the tutorial on how to make a tarantula cake that looks like it should be fighting Godzilla, and, if anyone decides to make one, please, PLEASE, for the sake of all that is sacred (like cake and cookies and anime) post a picture and let me know. So, yeah, if you liked it, let me know, and now… I’m off to make doughnuts.