A Collingwood FC cake for a football-mad boss

No one who knows my boss (or for that matter, any of his relatives) could doubt that he is football-mad. Not only was he rather a good player in the State league, he has a lifelong, mad allegiance to the Collingwood Football Club. Unfortunately, Collingwood (despite its passionate fan base) is the most unpopular club in the history of Australian competition, so when it came to the boss's birthday, I had an extremely difficult decision to make...

...Could I quell my own distaste for his hideous team....

... In order to make him happy with a Collingwood-themed birthday cake??

Well, clearly, it turns out that I could, and did. Many doubted my sanity, but I pushed onward, and tried not to think of all the Collingwood supporters leering at my cake with their gappy-toothed smiles and their jailhouse tattoos.

First I needed a model for the dreaded Collingwood logo, so I turned to the interwebs for that. I tried to find the clearest graphic that I could:

Then I needed to start with the basics - this is a chocolate mud cake coated with chocolate ganache and hot-knifed to be absolutely smooth.

For detailed instructions on that process, click here. (The link relates to ganaching cupcakes, but the process is the same for larger cakes.)

I then rolled a large sheet of white fondant icing and covered the cake's top and sides entirely with it, trimming the base carefully.

Now it was time to get to work on the detail. I cut two wavy triangles for the two flags at the base of the logo. The black-and-white Collingwood flag was fairly easy, but this one - the Australian flag - was fiddly.

I started with the Union Jack in the corner and then drew the outlines of the stars. Then I coloured in the rest in blue. I used food grade (non toxic) textas - the cheapest and easiest way to get these is to go to a good toyshop and ask for non toxic, washable children's markers. Crayola is fine for food colouring and works well.

I cut a tiny shield from rolled white fondant and printed the requisite foundation date of the Club (as neatly as I could - it's not easy to print neat letters with a soft nibbed texta onto soft-surfaced findant).

This picture shows several of the elements of the logo together: you can see the flag shapes partially cropped from the picture at the bottom, still unpainted, the shield shape, not yet printed, the wheat sheaves to go on the sides and the main oval plaque. I cut out all of the shapes first and put them together loosely so I could work out whether the basic proportions were right.

White-on-black lettering is harder than black-on-white, because you must first draw hollow letter shapes, then colour carefully around them. You can see this process underway in this picture.

The magpie in the centre was a hand drawn equivalent of the one on the logo - it could have been better but it was ok for this purpose. I copied it as closely as I could from the picture because the trick with this kind of cake is to be as accurate as you can.

The finished logo was assembled from each individual piece after each had been coloured/lettered. I used a very small amount of water to stick the pieces together - you need to be really careful when using water near colourings, as the cake's surface was pure white, and there is always a danger that the colours may run - you have been warned.

Presentation of the cake was somewhat delayed, as the boss was out of the office on the actual day, with a shocking feverish cold. We got it couriered to his house where it managed to put a smile on his face - and even better, he brought the remains of it back to work the next day, so we all got a chance to COMPLETELY DESTROY the Collingwood logo in a ceremonial, knife-wielding way!


Happy footballing from Dr Cupcake!

Chocolate whoopie pies with marshmallow chocolate filling

These bite size whoopie pies are my third whoopie pie experiment, and the first one that's actually worked yay!

They are about the same size as macarons, so I guess you could think of them as a kind of cakey macaron.

I made these using a brand new whoopie pie tin (who knew you could get these in Australia?)  - thanks to my shopping professional mum, who can find just about anything if asked. I swear one day I'll ask her to find me some sand from the moon landing and I'll get it for my next birthday.

The relevant things about this tin are a) very flat depressions for the whoopie pies, b) it's very heavy and thick so it distributes heat well and cooks the pies through without burning them; and c) it's nonstick.

I made a chocolate mud cake mixture and filled the whoopie tin holes with a teaspoon.

They looked like tiny pikelets. I was worried that they would rise too much and come right out of their holes and spread across the tin, but they were fine.

I gave them ten minutes in the very bottom of an oven heated to 160C.
This is where I really appreciated the quality of the cake pan- because it was so thick and heavy, it distributed the heat really well so that the little whoopie pies didn't burn even though they were so thin.
Also, the nonstick coating of the pan was top class. Some don't really work that well but this one released the pies with only the smallest encouragement from a spatula.

I put the whoopie pies on a rack to cool and started the filling.

This was possibly the weirdest (but one of the nicest) cake fillings I have ever made. It was like nothing I've ever made before, perhaps because I've never experimented with marshmallow.

Chocolate Marshmallow Filling
(from Claire Ptak's The Whoopie Pie Book)

Ingredients
100g dark chocolate
3 egg whites
150g caster sugar
2 tbsp golden syrup
pinch salt

First you need to melt the chocolate over simmering water, in the top of a double boiler saucepan, or you can build yourself a rickety saucepan plus bowl combo like I've done here (above).

Put the chocolate aside to cool a little. Then put all the other ingredients in another bowl and place this bowl on top of the saucepan of simmering water. Whisk the mixture until it's well combined.

At this point the recipe calls for you to beat it by hand for 10-12 minutes. All I can say is that I tried beating for about 3 minutes and my arm nearly dropped off. So I did the sensible thing, and switched to an electric beater.
I didn't know if this would affect it badly so I tried to do it as 'slowly' as you can do with electric - putting it on the lowest setting, only using one beater instead of two, and turning the beater off every 20 seconds to stir manually for 10 seconds. This worked fine.
The mixture slowly becomes very foamy and hot.

Take it off the heat and turn the beater to high speed, whipping up a storm. The mixture will (bizarrely) go much lighter in colour, from a mid brown to nearly white, and will get thicker and thicker - keep beating until it's almost too firm to beat.

Then, very gently, fold in the melted chocolate with a wooden spoon or spatula. This pic shows the chocolate being folded in super gently.

First time I made this, I had a disaster at this point (which I didn't photograph) - I stupidly assumed I could just beat the chocolate in, using the electric beater, just as I had been beating the mixture to its very firm and pale state. But when I tried, the mixture quickly lost all its firmness and turned into a sloppy mess.

The penny dropped when I saw what I had done - it's basically a cooked meringue mixture, with egg whites being responsible for the consistency. When you add other, heavy ingredients to meringue (like melted chocolate) you have to be careful to fold them in really gently because if you beat them in, you will beat all the air out of the egg whites and the mixture will sink. That's what I did with this mixture. I tried to save it by beating up a couple more egg whites to stiff peak and folding them in to firm the mixture, but it was useless - I had to throw it away and start again.

After the chocolate was DELICATELY folded in to the marshmallow mixture, I loaded it into a piping bag and piped a generous dollop onto half of the whoopie pies, then sandwiching them together.

You could just spoon it out but on balance it seemed easier and less messy to pipe it.

To finish them I melted down a small amount of milk chocolate and dolloped it on top, and stuck crystallised violets to it. I love the violet colour with the dark brown of the cake. You could use any type of decoration though.

A quick note, I also had trouble melting the milk chocolate smoothly - probably because I wasn't using couverture, just using a good quality eating chocolate. Well, actually it was a pretty basic quality eating chocolate. It melted patchily and lumpily, and you know what? I just thought 'What the hell,' and used it anyway, and hoped that the crystallised violets would cover up the lumps - which they did.

Key lessons from my chocolate whoopie pie experience:

1. A really solid thick cake pan is a good cake pan.
2. What did people do before nonstick surfaces?
3. Marshmallow filling is awesome and relatively easy to make, and I want to use it more.
4. Don't beat heavy ingredients into egg whites at stiff peak and expect them to like it.