Miss Elizabeth's Baking Blog: Panda Cake

It was my lovely uni housemate’s 21^st in August but I couldn’t be there to celebrate with her so I decided a cake was in order. If you met her you would understand the decision to make a panda cake. I think she might have been a panda in another life…It was pretty fun trying to assemble it as well, although transporting it across London was a tad treacherous (it only got slightly squished though so it’s all good).

Things that I learnt from making this cake: when assembling odd shaped cakes have a mass of cocktail sticks on hand.

Ingredients

8 eggs

13oz self-raising flour

16oz butter

16oz caster sugar

3oz cocoa powder

4 ½ tsp baking powder

To decorate

Lots of butter

Butt load of icing sugar

Cocoa powder

Black colouring

Milk and white chocolate buttons

Don’t panic about the massive amount of ingredients! I started off with a 6 egg mixture but I had to make a little extra afterwards for the small cakes, and there was some leftover.

Preheat the oven to 180⁰C. Firstly prepare a medium-sized pudding bowl and a small hemisphere pan by lightly greasing them all over, and dusting with flour.

I used my mum’s KitchenAid for this (my one’s in storage until I have my own kitchen again), but a large mixing bowl and an electric hand mixer will do the job just as well.

Cream the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy.

Add the eggs and mix again.

Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder into the bowl and gently combine all the ingredients together to form a smooth batter.

Fill the pudding bowl about ¾ of the way with batter and do the same with the hemisphere pan. Leave the leftover batter to the side, and bake these two in the oven until a skewer inserted into the middle comes out clean. For the pudding bowl this took about 1 hour 45 minutes, and the hemisphere pan took around 1 hour 15 minutes. After an hour I covered the pudding bowl one in foil to avoid burning the top. Leave to cool in the bowl/tin for at least 15 minutes before turning out onto a wire rack to cool.

When the hemisphere pan has completely cooled, wash it and prepare in the same way. Fill this with mixture. Prepare a cupcake tray with 12 cases and divide the remaining mixture equally between them. Bake the hemisphere pan as before and the cupcakes for 15-18 minutes or until springy to the touch. Leave everything to cool completely before you begin assembling/decorating.

To decorate you need a huge amount of icing. Start by making a standard white buttercream by mixing together butter and icing sugar until it reaches the consistency where it’s spreadable but will hold its shape.

I didn’t have any cake boards so I cut out a round of cardboard and covered it in tin foil to make the base. Slap a bit of icing onto the middle of it to give the cake something to stick to.

Place the pudding bowl cake, fat size down, onto the base. Have it slightly towards one edge so that there’s room for the feet.

Cover the top in icing then stick 4 cocktails sticks in a square into the top of the cake and gently press one of the hemisphere cakes into it. (Before this I had to trim the hemisphere cakes slightly to make sure they went together to create a round head shape.)

Cover that in icing then place the other hemisphere cake on top to create the head.

Get two of the cupcakes and cut a little crescent moon shape out of each side to make the ears. Plop some icing on the side of the head and on the cupcake where you want it to stick and firmly press together. Pop a cocktail stick through the ear and into the head to secure it. Repeat on the other side.

Shave the ‘muffin top’ bit off of a cupcake and secure onto the front of the head with icing and cocktail sticks to make the muzzle. (For some reason I forgot to take a photo of this bit, sorry.)

Adhere two cupcakes to the bottom of the pudding cake as with the ears to make the feet. You’re now ready to decorate!

Attach a medium-sized star nozzle to a piping bag and fill with the white buttercream.

Work your way around the cake, piping small blobs of icing. It helps to sketch a little doodle of which bits should be white and which should be black. The white is the head, apart from the ears and space for the eyes, the body apart from arm space, and a little bit on the feet.

Make some more icing at this point if you’ve ran out. Sift in some cocoa powder and then add enough black colouring until you’re satisfied with the colour. Fill another piping bag and pipe in the eyes, arms, feet and three dots at the back as a tail. I started to cover the ears in this way until it fell off in my hand…the icing is far too heavy piped this way for the ear to withstand it so spread some onto the ears as you would normally with a knife.

Use a standard round nozzle to draw the nose and the mouth onto the Panda’s face.

Finally stick two milk chocolate buttons with white buttons attached as eyes, and blob a bit of black icing as pupils. I also stuck white buttons all around the ears just because I felt like it.