I’ve been working on a cake for some friends of
ours whose son turns one in a few weeks. His name is Noah, and what cuter way to
celebrate with a Noah’s Ark cake? I was thrilled to be asked to make one for
them, I’ve always wanted a good reason to have a go at this much-loved theme,
and there are some amazing versions
out there! (like this one from "make me studio", also for a first birthday, and this phenomenal one, made for the threadless tees 2009 cake contest). I didn’t want to go down the fondant-covered boat
route, as though it looks very very cute,
shaping fondant around an awkward shape isn’t something I’ve had that much
practice with, and in my experience, if not done perfectly, it can look very shoddy indeed. Also, in my experience
(well, at any rate, my mum always did this, not that I was hyper or anything…),
parents don’t like their kids to eat too much fondant, so the fondant gets
taken off and left, and I hate (expensive) waste, so butter cream it was, with
a relatively simple ark shape and animals made out of fondant and/or marzipan,
with a few quirks thrown in. Noah’s dad is about as much of a geek as Nick is,
and so I had planned to put lots of cute sci-fi tid-bits in there, but the
problem with daleks and Cthulu is that they tend to be detail-heavy and thus
rather time consuming. So I settled for some waterskiing penguins and some angry
birds.
This cake was designed to “feed” 24-30 people, but I have to say it’ll be
tight, with quite small pieces each. Which is probably just as well as the
recipe I used turned out a rather dense, very moist banana cake with some incredibly sweet toffee butter cream. Yep,
banoffee cake, courtesy of Fiona Cairn’s “The Birthday Cake Book”.
If I could do it all again, I’d have chosen a cake that rises more and have a
full round cake under the ark portion, but realising this at 8pm on the Sunday
of delivery, when there’s no more butter in the house, is the most hopeless
time for action.
I used 3 times the recipe quantity for one cake, and baked it in a 30cm x 30cm
tin (the full size of the Silverwood multisize foldaway cake pan) adding 15-or-so minutes to the baking time, but doing it in several round tins
and sticking with the original timings will work just as well, if not slightly better. If you make it
with a different recipe (pretty much any other
recipe – banana cake is notoriously dense and doesn’t rise very much) then
these quantities of cake should easily be enough for 30 people, in my opinion.
I wanted quite a lot of butter cream and cake
layers so I cut the cake into 2 layers and sandwiched them back together with
the butter cream. I then cut 10cm off one end of the cake for the top of the
ark and cut the remaining block in half to give two 20x15cm rectangles and carved
both into a basic boat/ark shape. I sandwiched one ark shape to the other with
more butter cream, to give a basic boat shape with four cake layers, and carved
them so that the bottom of the boat was narrower than the top. I then trimmed
half of the 10cm off-cut to fit comfortably as the boxy cabin on top of the
boat shape, and covered the remaining off-cut with butter cream as an
additional, “behind the scenes” cake for serving. This is one of my gripes with
character cakes – I’m not good at carving shapes without wasting a massive
amount of cake! The ark was affixed to a cake drum, and the cake drum to a
plate, both with a good blob of butter cream.
To the rest of the butter cream I added an inordinate amount of cocoa powder
and a smidge of black food colouring paste to get a dark wood colour. The ark
was then coated in three layers of butter cream, with a good half hour to an
hour in the fridge between each layer, and finally smoothing the whole thing
off with a wet palette knife. Using the blunt side of a butter knife and
virtually no pressure, I then scored lines along the surface of the whole ark
for wood panels, and, using a toothpick, scored rivet holes at what would be
the joints of the panels.
For the water, I whipped up a quick batch up butter cream (80g unsalted butter
at room temperature whipped with 160g sieved icing sugar until light and
fluffy), coloured it with blue food colouring paste, applied it around the boat
and over the edges of the cake drum. And finally spent a good few hours rolling
animal shapes out of fondant/marzipan coloured with food colouring paste, fixing
any “bits” of animals to other bits (e.g. the elephant ears to the elephant
head, or the orange spots to the yellow giraffe-head) using water, and affixing
the characters to the ark either by pressing them into the butter cream (one of
the advantages of a butter cream covered cake), or with the aid of a wooden
skewer/dowel for the giraffe and elephant heads. The water-ski-rope for the
penguins is a chopped skewer pushed into the cake, and the skewer for the water-ski
handle is pushed into (ouch!) the penguin wings for balance.
For a final touch, I cut out a thinly-rolled rectangle of icing for a number plate, wrote on it using an edible-ink decorating pen (with which I also did the animal’s eyes), and stuck it to the back of the boat with a little water.
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