Roast Chicken Cake
Not it’s roast chicken cake!!!
Actually it is a moist vanilla sponge cake made to look like a roast chicken. Why you may ask, well the answer is very simple. This week we had to say goodbye to our IT trainee 🙁 as his traineeship was up and after two years of getting a person perfect for the role of IT we have to let them go and start all over again.
He was a bit of a gym freak who introduced the rest of us geeks to the way of the weightlifter which included lots of protein and carbs and no sugar. So every time we had cake at work he would refuse and instead spend most lunch times consuming large amounts of cooked chicken.
Making a cake that looked like a roast chicken was a bit of a challenge to me as I am vegetarian and it had been over a decade since I had spent anytime with a cooked chicken.
Chicken Cake Story
Pretty sure it is a cake
I did a lot of reading online and looked at numerous pictures of what other people had managed to create. The night before I made up the equvalent of 3 cake mixes of vanilla cake and poured the mixture into two round cake tins that were not the same size and baked. I was intending to do everything the night before but I felt unwell and ended up having to go to bed.
I got up the next morning at just before 5am (talk about dedicated). I made up a big batch of butter icing will 250g butter, 3 cups of pure icing sugar and a dash of milk. I put some butter icing on the largest cake, then the smaller cake on top.
I stared at the cake for a while. Picked up a knife and stared some more. I then cut a basic shape of what I thought a roast chicken would look like and was amazed that it did kind of look chicken shaped. I then became adventurous and cut from the remnant cake two drumstick shapes and two wings. I used more butter icing to glue the drumsticks and wings on and then stood a bit amazed that it still looked like a chicken.
The whole cake was covered in the rest of the icing and at that moment I was tempted to leave it looking like an uncooked chicken covered in cream. Instead I became adventurous and opened the packed of fondant icing, a product I had never used before. I read the instructions very carefully, warmed it in the microwave and kneaded away before rolling it flat. Then came the tricky part of picking it up and draping it over my chicken cake.
Or is it a chicken?
I patted the fondant around and the cake and did some creative patch work and it now was a raw, white uncooked chicken!
I then used a basting brush and painted the chicken various places with yellow food colouring. I made up the colour brown with the food colouring and transferred some of the colouring to a little bowl that had a mixture of warm water a glucose syrup in it. I then just painted, highlighting areas that would look more cooked and a I used the water/glucose mixture to give it a bit of a shine. I was very happy with how easy it was to create a cooked look. I also added a little cinnamon sugar on various edges (a suggestion given to me by one of the guys at work) and it made it look like seasoning.
End of cake making story
It was a big success at work and people thouught I was some sort of cake genius but really it was very simple to do and one of the easiest decorated cakes I have ever made. If you like making cakes I would recommend making one that looks like a roast chicken.
Well it had to happen we went shopping and replaced the items that had died. I now have an upside down fridge, which is bigger and so much better. Peter has a new washing machine which is also a lot bigger at 8kgs, maybe one day I will learn how to use it :).