Adventures in Cake Decorating #12 - Sonic the Hedgehog Cake

One of the niblings just turned seven, and he's already very into video games. Hence, a Sonic the Hedgehog cake.

Given the block-grid look of the landscape in the Sonic the Hedgehog games, this would have been the perfect opportunity to bring back the checkerboard cake. Notice I said, "would have been." And the more I think about it now, the more I'm kicking myself. Why didn't I do the checkerboard cake? Dang, our nephew would have thought that was pretty cool. 

And now I'm thinking, is it possible I never mentioned checkerboard cake before? 

Quick background: My sister has this cool Wilton checkerboard cake set that makes it easy to pour two or more colors/flavors of cake batter into the same pan, creating a checkerboard pattern when the layers are stacked. We used it on my first nephew's first and second birthday cakes (and maybe others I have forgotten), and somehow, I failed to take a picture of the inside of those cakes or to even mention the checkerboard at all!

Back to the present: To be honest, checkerboard cake didn't occur to me until I started writing this -- even though I was already making both vanilla and chocolate cakes! I'll blame it on my Friday-evening mindset after a long work week. Instead, I made the next best thing to a checkerboard cake, I suppose. There was a layer of vanilla cake between two layers of chocolate, and the landscape decoration around the sides of the cake included a rough checkerboard pattern of light and dark brown.

And now, for some insight into the decorating techniques:

By working from lightest to darkest colors, I needed only 1 bowl for cake mix and only 3 bowls for all these different colors of frosting. I started with the vanilla cake, and then reused all bowls and utensils for the chocolate cake, without even needing to wash them, because the little bit of vanilla just mixes right into the chocolate and disappears.

For frosting, I started with plain white, which I used for the filling between layers, and then reserved just enough in a piping bag to do Sonic's eyes later, as well as one happy little cloud in the landscape (on the back of the cake, not pictured).

The bowl for white frosting gets reused, with the addition of two other bowls, for these three base colors: blue, green, tan/brown. Sky blue was first, to spread over the majority of the cake. Then, it becomes a darker blue, which goes into a piping bag to create Sonic himself.

The tan color of Sonic's mouth and ear was borne of trial-mixing a little orange, a little pink, and a little cocoa powder. Then, I emptied that piping back back into the tan bowl to add more cocoa powder and brown food coloring for the lighter dirt color. After piping that onto the cake, back in the bowl, a little more cocoa, but at a certain point, you're just adding more powder, not color, and you'll have to adjust by adding more milk. So, just a little more cocoa and some black food coloring for the darkest brown frosting. And then, with the small amount of chocolate frosting left, even more black food coloring, and back into the piping bag one more time for the outlines, eyes, and mouth.

Green was just green. One and done.

Colored sugar sprinkles saved the candy-dipped pretzels. Sonic's rings on this cake are pretzel rings dipped in candy melts. They do make different colored candy melts, including yellow, but I just bought white chocolate ones from the grocery store baking aisle and tried adding golden yellow food coloring to them. They turned peach. Maybe a lemon yellow coloring would have worked? Anyway, there was no fixing it with dye now. So, after I dipped a few pretzels, I sprinkled yellow sugar over the tops before the candy coating could dry. Yellow enough and even a little sparkly!

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