Furry Furby

I know, I know...I've taken too long to update my blog. I've made quite a few cakes in the last week, entertained many requests for customised cakes and sadly had to turn down quite a few interesting orders. Yes, I'm in the Indonesian capital again, so while I won't be baking, I should definitely catch up on my updates.

One of the cakes, which I made for an acquaintance who had come to enjoy my red velvet fudge cake, is the Furby! I was really happy with how it turned out. Mummy J told me of how her girl loves the owl-eyed furball toy and wanted a birthday cake of her fave Furby.

She sent me a drawing with some modifications to a teal-coloured Furby to give an idea of how the cake should look like. So what Hasbro can't customised, I did just that in cake and cream :)

Furby of her dreams

I baked 9" round red velvet layers with chocolate ganache filling and had it cut out slightly around the sides to get the egg shape look for the Furby. It was simple enough to do. The features like ears, eyes, beak and feet were all made from fondant. Now the challenging part is to recreate the fur. As you can see, this Furby is mainly teal with spots of lime green. It also has these concentric pattern that I was studying on how to pull off.

The best frosting to achieve this is buttercream or the like. As you all know, I'm not a fan of buttercream, largely because of our weather. So a fluffy meringue cream will do the job. I whipped up a batch and had it coloured in teal, light turquoise and lime green. The cake was first treated to a generous ganache covering, then heaped on with teal coloured frosting. After that, the lime green frosting was spotted on and finished with a circular swirl of lighter teal. Here's the result...

Yummy Furby

Happy Birthday Ashley

This technique is the same as what I have done with Elmo and Cookie Monster cakes. I simply love making furry characters, and eating it too. Yums!

Doing the Ombre

As I was saying, it's a Rainbow week. One of the cakes is for Eve of thebottomsupblog.com  and she's been eyeing a rainbow cake for a while so her hubby's birthday was the perfect excuse for one. She requested for the layers between to have enough white frosting for the rainbow layers to stand out. Here's an amazing pic she sent me for an example.

Now I usually use cream cheese frosting, which doesn't give that distinct frosting layer but it's just enough to separate the colours. And although cream cheese starts out white, it somehow becomes pale yellow after whipping with sugar and some cream or butter. Still, it really taste the best among all the frostings.

However, for this purpose, I was going to abandon the cream cheese and try to make a super white frosting. I know I can achieve this with traditional buttercream made solely with shortening and icing sugar but it's just something I personally won't make - shortening is not the healthiest thing and it taste really synthetic. So I turned to my trusty meringue frosting (or fluffy boiled frosting). Made from meringue powder (egg white) and boiled sugar, it's whipped into a heavenly light marshmallow cloud that is perfect to achieve the above look. Unfortunately it didn't hold the layers as well as I would have like it to as it was a much softer frosting than buttercream or cream cheese.

Meringue frosting between layers

We were discussing how to decorate this cake when I suggested an idea to Eve. I've been wanting to try my hand at an Ombre cake – something that I came across while looking at the many baking blogs for inspiration. She liked the idea and off to work I went.

Ombre in the making

The textured look

Ombre means the multiple hues of the same shade of colour. It's a lovely technique that looks stunning and almost seems like a monochrome rainbow. I used cornflower blue for this ombre and made 3 shades of this blue finishing with the white. There's a great tutorial from thehungryhousewife.com that shows a step by step method on achieving this look. It's my first attempt and it was not as difficult as it looks at all.

Here's the completed cake...

Happy Birthday Alf

Sadly, I was told the cake had slid during transportation and the frosting was somewhat ruined :(  I'm going to work on the cream frosting again for better holding power and maybe I should also deliver this cake myself. Nonetheless, I hope the rainbow inside made up for it.