A byootaful Life

My favourite thing about birthdays is the cake. I love putting time and effort into making something that makes people go “WOW!” – even if it’s not fantastic, I think it still means so much because of that time and effort. You might remember the “boob cake” I made for Phill for his 21st in 2007? It was lost in the great blog explosion of 2009 so the post about it no longer exists, but it was quite a hit for a while there and I was pretty proud of myself. Professional I am not, but I do enjoy spending half a day in the kitchen making a big mess and making a cake.

This year, I decided to do a Simpsons-themed cake. Phill is a huge Simpsons fan and I normally buy him a Simpsons gag gift, just a little something Simpsons-related as a sort of tradition. This year, there was no Simpsons gift, so I figured, why not do a cake? I searched the internet for some inspiration and found this:

This cake was made by Meg of megscakes and I was absolutely blown away by her amazing skills! I decided to use this as my inspiration and I’d see how close I could get (HA, not very close!). I knew I wouldn’t be able to create something as professional as Meg’s but I’d at least use the characters as inspiration.

My first hurdle was the black fondant. I decided to buy ready-made icing and colour it myself, but I know black is a difficult colour to make and I hadn’t left myself enough time to buy some online. I spent a few hours racing around the local shopping centre trying all the bakeries and kitchen shops to no avail and alas, I decided last-minute that Snowball II would have to be sacrificed. The frame also went. I didn’t want to over-do the icing so I decided to just make the characters and stick them onto a chocolate buttercream, so they’d be easily peeled off if people didn’t like the taste.

It took me a good four hours (!!!) just to do the Simpsons characters. This didn’t include making and baking the cake, making the chocolate buttercream and getting the cake to the point of being ready for the characters to go on.

I basically tore off bits of icing, dyed it and then shaped it to mimic Meg’s characters. I used grease-proof paper which I found stopped the icing from sticking and kept a knob of butter nearby to keep my hands greased. Of course, I had forgotten to buy gloves so by the end of it all my hands had turned a funny shade of red/green/blue/yellow, but that came out after a few rounds of hand-washing.  I didn’t take a lot of photos during the character creation process (because my hands were so dirty), but here is the end result:

Vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream icing, with Simpsons characters made out of coloured icing. I was actually quite happy with the end result. The only thing that really bugged me was the length of Lisa’s neck. I had originally prepared all the characters on some grease-proof paper and was happy with the size, proportion and colours but once transferred to the cake (the point of no return!) I realised Lisa’s neck was huuuuuge! I wasn’t sure how that slipped by me, but oh well, I decided to leave it because I didn’t want to make a mess trying to fix it.

There were little creases and dints everywhere, but overall I was pretty happy. You should have seen how tall Marge’s hair started off as – once I’d got all the characters together, I realised it was pretty massively out of proportion, so I trimmed it off. There were a few (polite) comments from party-goers that they resembled the Simpsons cast from when they appeared on the Tracy Ullman show and I smiled and said that was what I was going for (ha).

I think my favourite character turned out to be Santa’s Little Helper, with his turned-up nose and sticking-out tongue and crazy eyes. I wish I’d been able to figure out the black icing for Snowball II because she’s slightly crazy too and her fangs would have been cool to make. Maggie turned out ok too (I was worried her dummy would look like a crazy red zit on her face or something but I think it’s passable). The hardest part of the characters would probably be her bow. Every time I prodded the sides in, it pushed the middle out – I couldn’t make it small and keep it proportional – it took forever, but I was happy with the end result.

So what do you think? I’m no whizz in the kitchen, but it was a really fun way to spend the majority of the day. When Phill came home and saw it, his eyes lit up and he was so excited – and that made all the stress worth it! Now to start planning next year’s cake…