RoboCup

When browsing through the threadless designs, I was struck by the Robocup image. It was quite simple, but had a certain quirkiness that appealed to me. I showed it to my partner, and, being a huge Robocop fan, he insisted I make it!

The cake itself was a basic lemon cake with some added spices of cardamom and nutmeg – I made 1 batch of batter and ended up with three rather misshapen small cakes. My oven and I were having a bit of a fight that day, and the cakes took much longer to cook than I was expecting, and came out looking a bit lumpy. Oh well, nothing that a thick coat of icing couldn’t fix!

I was also excited in doing this cake as it’s the first time I’ve tried using chocolate ganache, instead of buttercream, to cover my cakes. It was fabulous! I heated a bunch of dark chocolate pieces and cream in the microwave bit by bit, stirring in the chocolate lumps until the chocolate was fully melted. After it cooled for a bit, it was the perfect consistency for spreading on a cake.

I levelled off 2 of the cakes and sandwiched them together with some jam. Then I spread the ganache over the cakes. I let that firm up overnight, and the next day, I cut a circle in the top with one of my cookie cutters. I covered the exposed crumbs with more ganache, and got to work on the decorations.

I coloured some pieces of fondant, then rolled them out to apply them on the cake. I added the bottom half, and then the lighter grey top half. At this stage, I realised the bottom piece of fondant was looking more grey than black, so I diluted some black gel food colouring with some gin (no vodka handy...) and painted the bottom half black. I also painted the eye visor-thing on with the food colouring.

Next, I added the skin-coloured piece of ‘chin’, and attached the mug handle I’d previously shaped to let dry. I glued it on with a bit of royal icing. I drew on the mouth with an edible food marker and robocup was pretty much complete!

For a final decoration, I mixed some silver lustre dust with more gin and painted it over the light grey areas, to give it a metallic sheen. Then it was really down to presenting the cake to my discerning audience and seeing what they thought. Robocop himself was a little put out at first, but generally thought it was a nice effort. ED-209 thought it was Robocop at first, and wanted to chase him, but we soon sorted him out. Luckily, Robocop and ED were both able to settle down and enjoy a nice piece of cake together!

This was a fun cake to make and although the design was simple I’m happy with the finished effort. I’m so glad I used this cake as an experiment with ganache as this will be a very useful tool for me in the future. A great tasting cake *and* a new type of icing learned? I’d buy that for a dollar.