For a year we have had the pleasure of having two great guys in our faculty from Spain. Today is the day they leave, so yesterday we held a sort of farewell party for them. And of course I brought cake.

They are geologists, so the natural thing to do was another geology themed cake.  I didn't have much time so I didn't want to start any enormous project. This cake took me about two hours to make not including the cake base which I had made the previous day.

I wanted to try some different rock textures. I have made granite before and some sort of gneiss, but this time I wanted there to be many kinds of rocks so I experimented a little. With the filling then again I took the easy way out and made the same cream cheese filling originally belonging to the red velvet cake. On top of that I sprinkled some blueberries. I used milk with some vanilla essence to moisten the cake base.

 

Rockpile cake:

 

Chocolate cake base:

- 3 eggs

- 1,5 dl sugar

- 100 g margarine or butter

- 100 g chocolate

- 1/2 dl milk

- 1,5 tsp baking powder

- 1 tbsp dark cocoa powder

- 2,5 dl wheat flour

The proportions of this recipe I threw completely off the top of my head. Still the base turned out ok luckily. The base is not too sweet but it's still rich and chocolaty and the base isn't too soft so it suits a little more elaborate cake building.

Melt the chocolate with the margarine or butter in a saucepan. Whip the eggs fluffy together with the sugar. Mix together the dry ingredients and sieve them in the batter. Add also the milk and chocolate-margarine mixture and mix the batter smooth. Bake in an oven pan in 175 degrees celcius for about 15 - 20 minutes depending on your oven.

 

Make the cream cheese filling. Cut rock shapes out of the cake base and build a few rocks from the pieces. I filled the rocks separately. Moisten the cake base and spread on some cream cheese filling. Sprinkle on some blueberries and do the same for other layers. Build the same rocks the same way. Smooth the surfaces of the rocks out with some more cream cheese filling. If your cake has to last longer before serving I recommend using some sugar cream instead as insulation between the cake and the marzipan.

If you want you can use different flavours of filling in different rocks, but since I didn't have time and my cake was rather small I wouldn't have had time for four different fillings plus then I would have been left with too much excess filling of each flavours.

 

Making different rock textures from marzipan:

Tonalite aka. "white granite":

I had never before tried this way of making igneous rock texture, but it is a simple way if you need to cover a large cake with this texture. I don't like this way as much as the other granite since the result isn't as realistic. I think this texture ended up looking like some strange unnatural porphyric rock instead of a tonalite, but it will do this time. Tonalite is composed mainly of three kinds of minerals, or atleast three different looking ones. There's the white plagioclase, black mafic minerals and greyish quartz.

Roll some white marzipan flat, but not quite as flat as you need the sheet of marzipan to be in the end. Leave it about double the thickness. It also doesn't need to be the required size at this point. Chop up some grey and black pieces of marzipan and sprinkle them on the white marzipan sheet. If you want to do this more realistic, the black pieces should be smaller than the grey ones. You might want to brush a bit of water on the marzipan first so the pieces will stick better. Press the marzipan pieces slightly down with your hands first and then roll the pieces into the sheet with a rolling pin. Sprinkle some powdered sugar on to sheet or atleast on the rolling pin to keep it from sticking. You can chop up more grey, black and white pieces and sprinkle them on again the same way if you want a bit more complexity to the pattern.

 

Red granite or pegmatite:

Everyone knows granite, right? Well, granite comprises mainly of four kinds of minerals, it has one more main mineral than the white granite and that is K-feldspar which is a pinkish red. This way of making granite gives a more natural looking texture with even the grain edges seeming quite realistic.

Chop up all the colors of marzipan used in this rock: pink, white, grey and black. The black "grains" should be smallest and the others can either be all the same size or the pink "grains" can be a little bigger. If all of the "grains" are quite large the rock is called pegmatite. Sprinkle all of the pieces together so that the colors mix evenly. Press the pieces together slightly and roll them together. It helps if the marzipan is quite soft and sticky so that the grains stick together better.  This is especially important when covering large areas with this texture, since the grain edges will easily start breaking off from each other.

 

Gneiss or amphibolite:

This is a very simple texture to make. It's actually the same marbling effect used in some ofther cakes I've made.nYou need black or (dark grey) and white marzipan. My "white" was actually leftovers from the tonalite but it having some black in it didn't matter at all.

Shape the dark and light marzipan into two rods and twist them together. Do this atleast once more, dependng on how much or little you want the shades to mix together. After mixing them enough roll the marzipan flat.

 

Sedimentary rock:

Sedimentary rocks obviously are formed from different layers of sediment  which may differ from each other for example in their colour or thickness. Flatten a piece of the main colour marzipan slightly and slice it in pieces. Place some other coloured marzipan in between the pieces and roll the marzipan flat. If you wish you can paint some more stripes or for example cross bedding in the rock after you've covered it with marzipan.

 

Now you can cover your rocks with different rock texture. I did this on a separate plate and then lifted the rocks on the serving plate. The rest of the somewhat coloured marzipan I shaped to smaller rocks and placed them around the rock pile. I shaped two geologist hammers from brown and black marzipan and placed them on the rocks. The handle had a coctail stick in it to keep it from going limp since I didn't have time to let the decorations dry.

Here's my cake:

 

Along with the cake I also gave the guys handknitted Finland themed beer can coolers, or warmers... or hand warmers... Anyway, something to keep their beers cool and hands warm when drinking.

Bye guys! It was nice meeting you. Hope to see you again one day :)

 

 

Geologikakku - Kivikakku - Graniitti - Sedimenttikivi - Gneissi - Marsipaani - Suklaakakkupohja - Oluttölkin päällys