For the birthday cake we wanted something halloween theme obviously , but we also wanted something a little more individualized for the birthday boy. Luckily Minecraft and halloween are an easy combo.
For the recipe I searched and searched the internet. There are thousands and so many of them are different, not only in ingredients but in methodology as well. None that I found included the one thing I remembered, whipped egg whites folded into the batter. That’s how I know to make a cake and yet every recipe I found skipped this step. Frustrated I put the internet away and grabbed a giant old cookbook. The encyclopedia of Creative cooking, I figured it would have the basics and it did. It has a few different white cakes cakes which actually helped me understand the differences I was seeing online.
So I read through the recipes and settled on The Basic White cake recipe. In order to get a ton of recipes in this book they are lacking in details so while we changed a couple things I’ve also flushed out the direction details a bit here. The original recipe called for vegetable shortening I chose to use butter, resulting in a slightly denser final product.
Basic White Cake
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* prep time: 20
* cook time: 25 min
**Servings:12**
Ingredients:
- 2 2/3 cups sifted flour
- 1 1/2 cups sugar
- 4 tsp baking powder
- 1 tsp salt
- 2/3 cup unsalted butter
- 1 1/4 cup milk
- 1 tsp vamilla
- 4 egg whites, beaten
Instructions:
1.Preheat oven to 350 Deg
2.Seperate room tempurature eggs and beat egg white well
3.In a large bowl combine flour, salt, and baking powder
4.Add in softened butter, sugar,vanilla and 1/4 cup of milk mix until fully encorperated
5.Mix in remaining milk and egg white, blend
6.Bake for 30 minutes or until skewer comes out of the center clean, let cool in the plan for 10 minutes until turning out.
Our plan was to make a cube but only had circular pans so we have plans for the scraps. In order to make it as tall as it was wide we needed four layers.
Once the cakes were sufficiently cooled I stacked them up and made myself a stencil for the square. I careful cut straight down from the top layer. I wanted to cut them all together this way because I had them all oriented the best way to make them even on top without trimming them. I was so nervous to do this I kept putting it off until I couldn’t delay anymore.
I bought premade fondant to make things easier on myself, went with white and just coloured it orange using gel food colouring.
I used a basic buttercream, butter, icing sugar, vanilla and milk for my crumb coat and between all the layers.
Looks like a cheese wiz sandwich.
I rolled the fondant out and placed it over the cake. I was super nervous about this part too I do not have much experience with fondant. I covered the cake and pinched the corners, then cut the excess off. It ended up ripping on one side and I had to patch it so that instantly became the backside.
Now it looks like a block of cheese.
Next the decorations, I made a thin royal icing then thinned out even more with some water, it had the consistency of a thinned down paint. I wanted it this thin so it would be slightly translucent like water colour. It worked great, painting on fondant is surprisingly nice it’s a very sturdy base.
I layered up my thin icinging paint passing back over parts that needed to be darker a few times. I did a final piped on border around the face and corners to give it a little bit more definition then added in yellow highlights to help it look pixilated.
While I was doing it I kept thinking, it’s off, it’s too short, it’s wonky, but after it was done I decided I like it. It’s not perfect but as always I learned a few things and I think it looks good, most importantly the birthday boy will be happy.
So here is our Minecraft inspired jack-o’-lantern cake. We made other treats for Halloween too and I’m looking forward to putting it all together.