2D 1
My Other Ride Is a Light Cycle
by Sheri Chapp @Shukitty · submitted Aug 15, 2011 · 2011 contest
1 / 14
Description
This is my second entry of this year's contest, and I thought I would see if doing a 2-d cake went any easier than a 3-d cake. I decided on My Other Ride is a Light Cycle because I love Tron, I love my hoodie, and I had a fantastic idea of trying to make black-light sensitive frosting so my design would glow like my sweatshirt.
Unfortunately it didn't go quite as planned. The internet told me that adding a little tonic water to frosting would make it sensitive to black light, but I couldn't find any sort of actual ratio. So when I was making the butter cream frosting to pipe with, I subbed a little of the heavy cream with tonic water. I didn't want to make it too liquified, or loose the creamy texture so I only added about a tablespoon. I don't know if I needed to add more, or if butter cream is just the wrong frosting to try it with, or if the little black light lightbulb I bought was just not intense enough to make it glow fully. I'm guessing it was some combination of all of the above, considering my shirt didn't glow very much in the light either, and when I've worn it in other black-light places it glowed like crazy.
As far as the rest of the cake process went, I used a chocolate cake recipe off the Bakingdom blog, along with their really tasty buttercream recipe. For the base frosting, I added a little peppermint extract so it would be mint-chocolate. The chocolate cake came out a little dryer than I preferred, possibly because the proportion was really for a cupcake recipe.
For the design I decided to try a butter cream transfer. It worked fantastically well! It's not perfect by any means, but I was worried it would be really delicate or hard to transfer, but the actual process was super easy. Most of the sloppiness in the cake is just my own inexperience in not really knowing how to get smooth frosting. Also this was my first serious attempt at piping frosting, so there were a lot of crooked lines, uneven thickness, frosting breaking or glopping and such. But for my first ever attempt at a butter cream transfer, and at piping frosting, I'm really proud of how it came out.
It probably took about 5 hours total, not counting freezing/cooling time. I spread it over 3 days as I had time to work.
The cake ended up tasting pretty fantastic! I loved the mint+chocolate combination. All in all, it was a success.
Unfortunately it didn't go quite as planned. The internet told me that adding a little tonic water to frosting would make it sensitive to black light, but I couldn't find any sort of actual ratio. So when I was making the butter cream frosting to pipe with, I subbed a little of the heavy cream with tonic water. I didn't want to make it too liquified, or loose the creamy texture so I only added about a tablespoon. I don't know if I needed to add more, or if butter cream is just the wrong frosting to try it with, or if the little black light lightbulb I bought was just not intense enough to make it glow fully. I'm guessing it was some combination of all of the above, considering my shirt didn't glow very much in the light either, and when I've worn it in other black-light places it glowed like crazy.
As far as the rest of the cake process went, I used a chocolate cake recipe off the Bakingdom blog, along with their really tasty buttercream recipe. For the base frosting, I added a little peppermint extract so it would be mint-chocolate. The chocolate cake came out a little dryer than I preferred, possibly because the proportion was really for a cupcake recipe.
For the design I decided to try a butter cream transfer. It worked fantastically well! It's not perfect by any means, but I was worried it would be really delicate or hard to transfer, but the actual process was super easy. Most of the sloppiness in the cake is just my own inexperience in not really knowing how to get smooth frosting. Also this was my first serious attempt at piping frosting, so there were a lot of crooked lines, uneven thickness, frosting breaking or glopping and such. But for my first ever attempt at a butter cream transfer, and at piping frosting, I'm really proud of how it came out.
It probably took about 5 hours total, not counting freezing/cooling time. I spread it over 3 days as I had time to work.
The cake ended up tasting pretty fantastic! I loved the mint+chocolate combination. All in all, it was a success.
Baker’s site: www.sherindipity.com
