Pizza Cake

Before I got REALLY interested in making cakes, I looked online and tried to find a cake design that looked cool but didn’t involve special ingredients or fondant (as I didn’t even know where to start with that!!). I decided I would try to make a ‘pizza cake’ for my brother’s birthday so it was something a bit quirky. I read some instructions online and went with it…

The cake was just a vanilla buttercake and the icing was made as chocolate buttercream but this is where my interest in cake decorating grew… how could I get the icing to be more red like a tomato sauce base?? I was reading up online all about adding ‘true red’ coloring and ‘Wilton Red’ etc. At the time I was too rushed to look into it further but now all that lingo makes sense! I simply added a couple of drops of my own supermarket red food dye and played with the balance of colors to make the sauce but promised myself I would look into that red issue more…

The next trick was to add some shaved white chocolate using the cheese grater then put the cake under the grill / broiler until the chocolate melted slightly. I had a whole range of lollies / candies prepared including:

• marshmallows sliced in half and then shaped to look like mushrooms
• licorice straps formed into olives
• green snakes thinned out to look like peppers
• yellow jelly babies thinned to look like pineapple
• slices of coconut rough chocolates to look like salami

Then I topped it off with more shaved white chocolate. I would make it much more life like next time, but for a first attempt at making a funny cake, I was satisfied!