How I made a spiderman cake

I don't have a very good memory, but one thing I do remember is sitting down in the weeks leading up to my birthday and taking my time to look through the Women's Weekly Children's Birthday Cake Book.  It was several weeks of weighing up the best option before locking in our choice.  It was a big decision!

Between my brother, sister and myself we had Mum make many of them.  I loved my doll cake, my brother had a cricket cake and my sister had the pool cake.  Her birthday is in December and it was really hot, in the high 30's, and the cake was made from jelly, you can guess what happened next!  I remember that birthday!

For MJ's first birthday I went straight back to this book and was very excited when Mum gave me her original version.  His first cake was the traditional Number 1 cake.  Like the one below but I used chocolate ganache to ice -  I didn't take a photo of the finished cake. I know, ridiculous!

For his second birthday he still didn't really know what was going on so I maintained choosing rights, (what? I held on for as long as I could!!) and so made the Choo Choo Train on the front cover. In my defence, he was really into trains at this point and he was happy with my decision!

 

MJ gained choosing rights for his third birthday and it was Lightning McQueen all the way.  Then on the day of his party he added 'But where is Mater?'  So after some quick googling, a small Mater cake was added too!

 

So this year he was definitely having a Spider Man cake.  We looked through the Women's Weekly book together and he really liked some of the old-school cakes, but when I showed him some I had pinned (follow me at Danielle L) he was having a Spider Man themed party and cake.  So I got my Google on and made this:

 

I made my favourite mud cake, a recipe I found for his first cake. A rich, dense mudcake. Apparently this blogger had the same experience with the book and her mud cake recipe is amazing. http://waitingforagnes.wordpress.com/2010/08/23/faking-it/ I doubled this recipe and it was perfect.



 

Lots of the instructions on Google showed how to cut a round cake to get the spiderman shape, but I used my 20cm x 30cm (base measure) cake tin and so was able to use a template I printed off to cut around.  The template was a bit small so I had to freehand a little hence the lack of symmetry. Just google search for a template that you like.  I have the one I used pinned on my 'Boy's birthdays' board.  I shaped a small piece of cake to add dimension for the nose.

 

 

 

 

Last year I made a marshmallow fondant icing, but I found this queen icing at Woolworths this year.  Red and black are hard colours to make without using food colouring gels, so this turned out to be cheaper and easier.  I kneaded the red icing and rolled out the red icing on my bench which I had rubbed with copha. I used two packets of icing and once I reached the size I needed, I used a piece of string to measure the cake, I rolled it over the rolling pin and placed over the cake.  I had iced the cake with chocolate icing as a crumb layer but hadn't smoothed it as much as I should, hence some of the bumps.

 

I then rolled out the black to cut out the eyes and rolled it into long lengths to make the black lines.  I had used a skewer to mark the lines according to the template.  I used some white icing to fill in the eyes and, walla, the cake was made!

 

I was mostly happy with it, not completey pro, but not bad either.

 

Happy baking