With my daughter Anwyn turning 12, I wasn’t sure she’d want me to bake another weird birthday cake for her as I’ve done for the past decade or so. I was pleasantly surprised a few months ago when she began asking me about what kind of cake I was thinking of making and took that as a sign to start planning for this year’s culinary engineering project. This year’s cake came together at the last minute thanks to a busy spring travel schedule, and the usual set of last-minute surprises that crop up, so it’s not the most elaborate creation I’ve come up with but everyone seemed happy with it. Even I was pleased because it did allow me to accomplish one of the goals I’ve had for my cakes: incorporating some electronics in the mix.
Since Anwyn’s birthday party included an outing to see the new
Get Smart spy comedy/thriller
movie, I’d originally intended to bake up a cake in the shape of a “
shoe phone” in homage of the original TV series. Unfortunately, I realized that the movie’s brief references to the original shoe phone (now a museum piece) would not be enough to make the idea funny for my pre-teen audience. My first thought was to make a cake that reflected one of her current passions but since I’d already done a horse-themed cake for her last birthday (see my July 2007
piece) I went with the second love in her life: her iPod.
In some ways, an iPod cake is simplicity itself – a rectangular slab of cake covered with icing, some white icing to represent the scroll wheel and display, and some neat clean lettering – but if I was going to create one I wanted it to have at least a few extra twists to it.
One of the things I wanted to do was to come up with an icing that approximated the smooth sheen of the iPod case, something I hoped to accomplish with a
white chocolate ganache frosting I found at the
Joy of Baking site. This might have worked if I hadn’t panicked and tried to thicken up the runny-looking concoction with some granulated sugar: a tactic that did give the icing more body but also gave it a sandy, distinctly un-satin appearance. If I do that again, I’ll try fine confectioner’s sugar…
With time running out, I could not go back and re-do the icing so I proceeded on with the rest of the cake. Fortunately, the other tricks I planned for the cake turned out much better. Instead of using icing to form the scroll wheel, I melted some of the white chocolate I had left over from the ganache and cast an upsized replica using a round storage bowl that had a circular indent in it. The result was a decent-looking 6 inch edible replica of the scroll wheel that only required a steady hand and a small tube of black cake gel to apply its characteristic arrow markings.
I also used the white chocolate to cast an upsized version of the iPod rectangular screen. Instead of leaving it blank or trying to draw the iPod menu on it, I decided it needed to be playing a rock video. This was accomplished by borrowing the cover from one of my daughter’s favorite CDs and bringing it to a local bakery that prints so-called picture cakes. The edible décal they produced when they scanned the album cover came out much nicer than I’d expected and looked even better when it was applied to its white chocolate backing plate.
The only remaining trick was to add sound by burying a speaker in the cake and driving it with an MP3 player. I scrounged through my junk box and was unable to locate a suitable speaker so I trundled off to the only source for little electronic fiddly bits in the area- Radio Shack. Much to my dismay, Radio Shack’s token support for the electronics hobbyist has waned so badly that their meager assortment of components no longer includes the small speakers I used to buy for my projects when I was younger. With time running even shorter now, I improvised and found a pillow speaker that put out just enough sound to make its presence known from inside the cake.
While not perfect, this year’s iPod cake was fun to make and, more importantly, was a big hit with Anwyn’s friends, who spend several minutes admiring it and listening to Pink’s "
Stupid Girls" emanating from beneath its frosting before devouring it.
Comments? Questions? Ideas for next year's Extreme Cake? Write me at
lhg at en-genius dot net or add your comments to our blog, below.
