Hello! 

We are back with a very special cake! We are celebrating our new Dr. Alejandre, or as Elsy and me refer to her lately “Dra. Anvorguesa” (inside joke related to a meme). We are very proud of the great professional and amazing human being she is, and of course glad that we can call her our friend.

So, Marta finished her PhD program early this week and she worked on reformulation of different meat products. Late august, Gwen, our friend/lab technician had this crazy idea of us making a meat product related cake, which in the beginning we thought it was too crazy to actually do it (cause we had never done those kind of cakes). We started looking for pictures and give ideas on how to make it, we did some research on the topic and found some very useful videos on YouTube, pictures on Pinterest, and we did some testing before actually making  the cake.

Neither Elsy or me had ever worked with fondant before, so this was a new experience  and basically a risk: the most probable outcome was us ruining the cake, but we stayed positive and we got it together. In summary:

It was a present to our friend from all the Broma girls

Idea: Gwen

Execution: Elsy from the Block and me 🙂 

For the cake, we kept it simple: a white vanilla cake.

Ingredients

For the cake

• 3 cup all purpose flour
• 2 cup white sugar
• 1 tbsp baking powder
• 1 cup milk
• 1 cup softened butter
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 5 egg whites

For frosting

• approx. 100 g butter
• Powdered sugar
• heavy cream
• vanilla extract

Instructions

1. Pre heat oven to 180 C / 350 F and prepare one 10″ round cake pan or two 8″ cake pans. Set aside.
2.  Allow egg whites to sit around 30 min before beating them.
3. In a medium bowl combine flour and baking powder.
4. In a small bowl, mix milk and vanilla together and set aside.
5. In a medium bowl beat butter until creamy. Add sugar and mix until fluffy. Add the flour mix alternating with the milk. Set aside.
6. In a clean, grease free bowl, beat the egg whites until stiff peaks form. Fold gently into cake batter. Pour into the prepared pans and bake for: 

• one 10″ pan: 1 hr 30 min
• two 9″ pan: 35-40 min 

Once done, let it cool in pan for about 15 min, the remove and transfer it to a cooling rack. They are big cakes, so it will take time for them to be cool enough to be frosted.

For the frosting: Beat butter until fluffy. Start adding sugar and about 1 tbsp heavy milk. Add more sugar (until consistency is OK to work, not so runny but not hard) and 1 tsp vanilla extract.

Once the cake is cooled, you can start frosting. In this case, as we were going to cover it with fondant as well, just a thin layer of frosting was needed to secure the fondant to the cake and and flavor. We kept the cake in the fridge until fondant was ready.

Sausages: This could have perfectly been made with cake crumbs, but we forgot, so we made pancakes (using this Fluffy pancake recipe) and then destroyed them and add some frosting, shape them as sausages and froze them.

Burger patties: We used chocolate rice Krispies, pink marshmallows, cocoa powder and a bit of butter. 

1. heat a small pan and melt the butter.
2. Add marshmallows and melt them. Once completely melted, sparkle cocoa powder and mix to make it look less pink and more brownish.
3. Once you got the right color, add rice krispies.
4. Put some oil on your hands to manipulate the mix because it will be sticky. Shape the mix into burger patties and place them on a plate. Set aside until decoration.

For fondant: We bought one that comes prepared and in different colors, all we had to do was soften it and shape it, which is hard to do actually. As the cake was supposed to look like a grill, the distribution was as follows:

• cake top: black with thin white strips to simulate the grill.
• around: red, that would be the outside of the grill.
• Letters: yellow letters that said: Dra. Alejandre.
• Cover for the sausages: red

To attach each piece of fondant to the cake, we made sure there was frosting when cake-fondant, and when fondant-fondant we applied a very small amount of water just to stick the pieces together.

The very last part was to put the decorations on top, the burgers, sausages and the little flags on top. To stick the letters we used “food glue” but maybe we did something wrong cause the letters kept moving forever haha.

Finally, this is the result of almost 6 hours of work and a lot of inspiration:

Congratulations Dr. Alejandre!