Super Mario Cake!

This weekend I made the Super Mario cake for Juliet's birthday that I talked about earlier. Throughout the process, I made sure to take lots of photos to document the process.

Read on for instructions about how to make your own Super Mario cake!

[A note on pictures - do not adjust your monitor. For some reason every photo taken in my kitchen ends up looking like it was taken in a dungeon. I don't know why this is.]

I started by baking plain cakes. This was done the day before icing, so that I would have a chance to freeze them. It is approximately five thousand times easier to ice a frozen cake than one which is warm or merely room temperature.



I ended up making a lot more cakes than I thought I would have to. I originally made a plain sponge (which I coloured pink) and also a chocolate cake (which I cooked in two tins so I would have layers). The next day, I realised that there was not enough cake to give me the height I needed to properly decorate the sides. So I made more cakes:



After the second batch of cakes had cooled all the way on wire racks, I popped them in the freezer while I started on the icing. I had to make four separate colours: black, green, blue and yellow. I cheated and used pre-made Betty Crocker icing for this step, as I knew I would be adding liquid and doing a lot of stirring. I needed icing with a consistent consistency, so to speak, and I didn't know if home-made buttercream would be up to the task.

For the most part, colouring the icing was easy. The only challenge was getting black icing. To do this, I mixed chocolate icing with insane amounts of blue food colouring. I wasn't entirely happy with the result; it was very greeny-blue, which I think I could have remedied if I had added some red in there as well; but I had used up all my red food colouring the day before on meringues (partially pictured above). Overall I was happy with the icing.



Once the icing was mixed, the fun part - assembly - began.

I took all of my cakes out of the freezer. Some had been in there since the day before, so they were a bit more 'frozen', but they were all quite cold.



I then prepared a cakeboard by wrapping a plastic chopping board in foil, and began to put together the bottom layer of my cake. I used chocolate icing between the layers to secure them:



Once I had stacked up all four, I iced around the sides and the top:





Then I prepared the top layer. For this I had two types of cake: pink sponge, and plain buttercake. The sponge was not very light or airy, and the plain buttercake had a nice dome-like top, so I decided to put the sponge at the bottom. I didn't need to use anything to stick them together as the top of the sponge was quite sticky (I'm not really sure why.) I then cut around both of them to make them narrower. This was so I would have a big enough ledge to decorate the bottom layer.



Then I popped it on top of the bottom tier and iced it. Because I had cut away the crust, the icing quickly became filled with crumbs, and it was not as smooth looking as I had planned.


Then I did the last little tier - a small square cake. I made this by baking some of the sponge mixture in miniature rectangular tin, then I cut the finished cake in half and froze it. I then iced this and put it on top:



The whole thing was looking a bit messy at this stage, but I hoped it might be redeemed by the decorating. The decorating had a few different elements, which are explained below, going from the bottom of the cake to the top. All of the candy I used to decorate was simply pressed into the icing. Luckily, none of it fell off.

1. Underworld Bricks

I prepared these a few days ahead, but they don't take that long to do. These are made out of white cooking chocolate that I melted the chocolate, stirred in blue food dye, then poured it into a foil-lined swiss roll tin and refrigerated. Once set, I scored the chocolate with a sharp knife and then broke into little squares.

2. Pipes

These are made out of Darrel Lea Green Apple Liquorice, which I sliced in half lengthways and then cut into different heights.

3. Dirt/Bricks

This is just Cadbury chocolate. Too easy.

4. Clouds

For these I cut white marshmallows in half and stuck them, sticky-side down, into the icing on the top.

5. Mushrooms

These are just small meringues, coloured red with food dye, and sitting on top of white marshmallows. I cut the tops of the marshmallows so they would stick to the bottoms of the meringues more easily. To decorate the tops of the mushrooms I finely chopped up more marshmallow and rolled little spots out of the mush.

6. Question Mark Detail

This was just sliced black liquorice, which I pressed into the icing.

As an afterthought I pressed chocolate coins into the cake. I had planned to scatter them on the cakeboard, but given that I had to transport the cake in the car, I knew they would slide all over the place. Luckily we got it there, all in one piece.

And now ... drumroll please ... I present the finished product!