I’m not the biggest fan of moulds
for cakes that are a weird shape as the cake never comes out evenly baked but
this one called out to be made. It was an important birthday for someone at
work and he is a Dr. Who fan. I accepted early on that this cake would be style
over substance but who can resist something that requires painting in metallic
edible paint!!!
I decided to make a mainly red
Dalek as it meant I could use red food colouring in the mix and have a good
base of colour for the majority of the cake. I highly recommend this site
(Cakes, Cookies and Crafts) for the paint. I used metallic red and gold paint
with the silver being done with metallic powder. I also had gold metallic
powder, because I bought everything (!) having not done this before, which
worked very well but was messier than the paint so you had to be more careful. The
powder has the bonus of being dry immediately but I’m not sure getting powder
over everything was worth that.
There weren’t instructions with
it but on the Lakeland site, where I bought the mould, they recommended an
eight egg cake mix. I did that but it wasn’t enough and I think that if you’re
trying to fill every nook and cranny ram it with more cake mix than you need.
It meant I missed out on some detail so below is the recipe I recommend using
10 eggs! (They also suggested putting a thin layer of frosting on the cake and
covering with royal icing before painting. Seriously! What kind of sadists are
they? Can you imagine everything that could go wrong?! If you’re brave do it
that way but I’m happy with the painting on cake method).
Ingredients
Lurpak Cooking Mist (seriously
this is necessary and amazing)
500g butter, softened
500g sugar
10 large eggs
500g self-raising flour
40g red food colouring (bake
safe)
1 x pot of metallic red edible
food paint
1 x pot of metallic gold edible
food paint
1 x tube of metallic silver
edible food powder
1 x pack of Matchsticks (you only
need 1 ½ but you can scoff the rest)
1. Preheat the
oven to 180°C/GM4.
2. Grease your
mould well. This is key to using any mould as you need to get the sucker out
afterwards. This cooking mist allows you to just spray every part. Make sure
you don’t have too many puddles but the cake batter will mix with it and it
should be fine.
3. Cream the
butter and sugar. Add 2 eggs, then 100g of flour mixing well. Repeat with the
rest of the eggs and the flour. Then add the food colouring and mix really
well.
4. Put the
mould on a baking tray to keep it steady and allow you to move it around. Pour
the batter into the mould. It should fill it almost to the top. Then pick the
tray up a few cm above the work surface and drop. The aim of this is to get the
batter into every part of the mould so do it two or three times.
5. Put the
mould, on the baking tray, into the oven. Cook for about an hour and a half –
the batter may spill over the top but it will only go on the tray. If the top
is burnt it shouldn’t matter as you’ll be cutting it off once it’s out of the
oven because it’s probably outside the top of the mould. You can check with a
skewer if it’s cooked but it could need longer. Err on the side of caution and
over cook if in doubt.
6. Once cooked
leave the cool in the mould. This is important as you’ll have more chance of
getting it out in one piece (saying that I always get impatient and do it when
it’s warm!)
7. Before you
turn out cut any cake that is over the top of the mould off so you have a
smooth back to the cake.
8. Turn out and
paint! I started with red, and then did the gold detail, ending with the
silver. Make sure each layer/colour if dry before putting more on top. I did
two layers of each and that seemed to do the trick. Finish by shoving half
lengths of Matchsticks in the three points where Dalek’s have sticky out things
(or you can fashion them out of black icing but after all that painting who has
time for that?)
N.B. This cake is going to be a bit dry, as you’ve probably
overcooked, so maybe have cream or frosting on the side for people to add.
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Ok so the painting part was lots of fun
