I got a cake order for a birthday cake. A ten person car cake that should look somewhat like a red BMW M5. The request was that it was a cocoa based marzipan covered cake with strawberry and banana as the flavours in the filling, the look being similar to one of my previous cakes, the van cake.
Cake base:
- 5 eggs
- as much sugar as the eggs
- as much flour as the eggs
- 2 tsp baking powder
(- 2 tbsp dark cocoa powder)
Preheat the oven to 175 degrees celsius. Beat together the eggs and the sugar in a bowl until when you lift the whiskers the pattern of the running down batter is left to be seen for a few seconds. Mix together the flour and the baking powder. If you are making a dark base with cocoa powder like me, make it so that the combined amount of the cocoa and the flour is as much as the amount of eggs. So in this case there's a little less flour than if you would make a white base without cocoa. Fold in the flour mixture in the batter, put it in a cake mold or an oven pan and bake in the oven for about 15 - 20 mins. Atleast that's about the time it takes if you use a large flat oven pan like me. If it's in a smaller but thicker container it may take longer to bake. This recipe is a modification from a recipe by Kinuskikissa (in finnish).
For moisturising the base:
- 1,5 dl juice (i used a mixture of fruit juice and the liquid from the defrosted strawberries)
Filling:
- 2 - 2,5 dl whipping cream
- 250 g quarck
- 2 tbsp sugar
- 1 tsp vanilla sugar
- 1,5 dl strawberries
- 1 banana
(- 4 - 6 sheets of gelatine or 4 - 6 tsp of gelatine powder)
Whip the cream and mix the quarck, sugar and vanilla sugar to it. Divide the filling to 2 bowls. In one bowl mix in the crushed strawberries. In the other one mix in the crushed banana. To keep the banana from getting brown, mix in some lemon juice once the banana has been crushed.
If your filling seems a little runny, use some gelatine to stiffen it slightly. You don't need to make it into a jelly, just a little more hold will do. When using gelatine sheets let them sit in a container of cold water about 5 mins before dissolving them to a small amount of hot liquid like water or juice. When using the gelatine powder you can do the dissolving directly into the hot liquid. Mix half of the gelatine mixture well into each bowl of filling.
Cut your base into 4 sections like this:
Take one of the large pieces and set it on the plate you will serve the cake from. To avoid messing up the plate while making the cake you can lay down pieces of baking paper so that the pieces are just under the cake base from each edge. Remember to moisturise each layer and spread a layer of both of your fillings on top. Add the second large cake base piece on top of the first one and this time spread a layer of both of the fillings just in the middle of the piece. The area you fill should be the size of your smaller base pieces. Set one of the small pieces on top of the filling and again fill the top of it. Place the last piece of cake base on the filling. The last piece you should moisturise from below before putting it on the cake.
Now you have a very crude shape of a car ready. Yes, it kind of looks like a car... but... a Lada? So now we are going to cut the actual shape of the car from this cake we have assembled. For this i used a small serrated knife. So round up the sharp edges and such. Don't worry if your shape isn't perfect. Mine never is at this point. In fact, at this stage of the cake making my cakes usually look like a mess.
The surface will be evened out with sugar cream. Original recipe is from Kinuskikissa (in finnish).
Sugar cream:
- 125 g margarine
- 250 g = 4 dl powdered sugar
- 1/2 tsp vanilla sugar
- 1 tbsp water
(- color or flavour of your choice)
Soften the margarine in a bowl by mixing it with an electric mixer. Add the vanilla sugar (and the color or flavour if you choose to use some). Whip a little of the powdered sugar at a time in the mixture on high speed. Once you're done adding the sugar, mix in the water until it's incorporated.
Put a little of the sugar creme in a separate small bowl and heat it in the microwave oven just a few seconds at a time until it's a nice consistency for spreading. When cool the sugar creme is usually too stiff to spread evenly. When softening up just a little at a time instead of the whole amount you don't risk forgetting the cream in the micro for too long and if you do, you can mix in some of the cold creme and it might still be useable. Spread the whole surface of your cake with the cream. Don't worry if some of the filling or crumbs are mixed with the sugar creme. They won't be showing from under the marzipan anyway. Smooth out the surface well. The marzipan isn't very forgiving when it comes to showing bumps.
Either use a ready colored marzipan or dye your own shade of it. I like to always buy white marzipan and dye it myself. Put a little of the color in the marzipan and squeeze and roll until the shade is completely even. Add more color if needed. You will probably want to use a pair of rubber gloves to keep from coloring your hands aswell.
Roll the marzipan flat (i used about 350 g) with a rolling pin with some powdered sugar. I do this on a silicone baking mat so it won't stick. Carefully place the marzipan sheet on your cake, smooth out the surface and trim the excess marzipan from the edges. Dust off any excess powdered sugar.
At this point i painted the surface of the cake more red since it would have taken so much food color to dye it through. Also painting will bring a gloss to the cake instead of it being matte. Cars are usually shiny so i thought it would suit it well. I also painted a little bit of shading on the bottom part of the cake to create some shading to create the under the car space kind of feeling. After painting you can remove the protective sheets of baking paper.
I made the windows from light blue marzipan. You can "glue" marzipan to marzipan by wetting the surface so that it will stick. I made all the other decorations for the cake from marzipan aswell. I "glued" them in the cake and made a few shallow lines that suited the car contours by pressing lightly with a toothpick.
Here's the cake ready in time for picking up:
Autokakku - Marsipaanikakku
