Gavin's Mighty Morphin Birthday Cake!

It was Gavin's 27th Birthday this week. It was a bit of a challenge to come up with something awesome to make a cake out of that I could make using butter icing (Gav's favourite type). Here is what I came up with:

The Project: Gavin's 27th Birthday Cake
The Theme: Power Rangers
Ingredients:
For the Cake:
18oz Butter
18oz Sugar
18oz Self Raising Flour
9 Eggs
9 Dessert Spoons of Cocoa Powder
For the Icing and Decoration:
Spare Cake Crumbs
Butter
Icing Sugar
Red Food Colouring
Cocoa Powder
Peppermint Flavouring
Cadbury Twirls
White Royal Icing
Black Royal Icing
Edible Silver Paint

I've made a helmet cake before (previous to the Bakerry Blog), so I knew how to assemble it and what I needed to do to prepare for it. 

After Baking the three chocolate cakes and waiting for them to cool, I mixed up the butter icing for the middle. I never measure the butter or the icing sugar, I always mix it by eye and then to taste, I find that using different butters can make the buttery taste unpredictable. I added cocoa powder and peppermint flavouring. I crumbled some Twirls into the icing too (keeping the pieces chunky); this made a somewhat delicious mint chocolate butter icing, to go nicely with the chocolate cake. 

To make the helmet shape, the cakes were stacked off centre

I did smooth down the edges on the front of the cake and I cut in a groove for where the mouthpiece will go, unfortunately I cleverly did not take a picture of that part though. The next step is to mix together some butter icing with cake crumbs, this ends up covering the cake as a bottom layer, allowing you to control the shape, making it smooth and adding curves where you need to. 

I had to pop it in the fridge to set for a little while as I was adding more butter icing on top of it. 

Once it was suitably set that it would not mix in with the outer layer of icing, I mixed together the butter icing with the red food colouring and began the decoration. I marked lightly with a knife where the visor would go, adding too much butter icing would mean that it would possibly slip down the cake, I wanted to ensure that the visor went onto the butter icing base. 

Once the white icing was rolled out and cut to shape, the messy job of adding it to the cake without getting covered in red icing, began. 

Then the gaps were filled in with the red icing. I rolled out extra white icing for the teeth and for the mouthpiece and put them to one side. I then prepared the black icing for the main part of the visor and stuck to the white. Happily in place, the teeth were cut and added one by one.

More white was used for the mouthpiece and the lips and stuck to the front of the helmet.
Extra red butter icing was added to the front of the visor to form the shape of the nose. Black icing was used for the eyes and the nostrils of the dinosaur.

The teeth and the mouthpiece were painted with the edible silver paint.

Once the front was finished, the detail needed adding to the top of the helmet to make up the rest of the face of the dinosaur. This was a bit tricky because I had to pipe this with black icing by hand, I marked roughly where I had to pipe.

All that was left was to write "Happy Birthday Gavling!" and the helmet of the Red Power Ranger cake would be finished

He liked the cake, the only difficulty I had was actually getting it to the restaurant in one piece. I need to remember to purchase bigger cake boxes.

Total Time Spent: 4 Hours, 30 minutes (not including chilling time)
Useful Tips Gained: Butter Icing based cakes are not as scary as they seem
Kitchen Items to Purchase: Stronger food colouring
Items added to Amazon Wishlist: None
Miscellaneous Items Wished for: Bigger Pallet Knife