It's really more of a building cake or a city cake, and you certainly could top it with any superhero (or no superhero at all), but let me tell you the story of how this so-called Spider-Man cake came to be.
and afterward vowed never again to use red icing as the main color...
only to do it again on a Mickey Mouse cake.
The next time I included Spider-Man on a cake, I used red as the main color but only for his small section of the cake. That's right, it was the Multi-Hero cake!
A new Spider-Man cake request came up this year. Because the birthday boy and his mom had no specific design in mind, I had the perfect plan for using no red icing: a Spider-Man scene, instead of a cake that looked like the hero himself.
I remembered that small toys make handy cake decorations (a competing interest with my preference for everything on the cake to be edible, but a much easier option than sculpting a Spider-Man figurine out of modeling chocolate!). And so I had a vision -- two skyscraper cakes, with a Spider-Man swinging from his web between them!
OK, in reality, two moderately sized city building cakes, with some spiderwebs piped here and there and Spider-Man standing atop one building, shooting a white chocolate web to the other. A white cardboard cake board underneath it all would provide a canvas for drawing city streets below to complete the scene. What follows is how I executed this plan, with a photo of the finished product, of course. One note: As with many of my cakes, I rushed to finish.
It started with one vanilla cake and one chocolate cake, each baked as large, thin rectangle. I used baking sheets rather than cake pans so I could simply cut squares out for stacking multiple thin layers of the two flavors:
I froze these stacks overnight. In the morning, I trimmed, shaved, and sculpted the uneven sides of the frozen cakes with a serrated bread knife. I spread a thin layer of light chocolate buttercream on all sides (the "crumb coat"), and froze it again just to harden the icing faster.
The light chocolate buttercream became the main frosting for the brownstone-like buildings. Fudge chocolate icing right out of the can is what's top. A little white buttercream with yellow coloring made the windows, with the remaining white used to pipe a couple of spiderwebs on the building corners.
The web coming from Spider-Man's hand is white chocolate. I melted white chocolate morsels and piped a web pattern onto wax paper (it turned out more like a net or a lattice, but within the scene it works). I propped the wax paper into a slight curve -- how I wanted the white chocolate to cool and harden, rather than just flat. It worked but was very delicate and broke when I moved it. Not to worry -- I melted the extra white chocolate and used it as glue to hold the web pieces back together... But I didn't have time to let the repair solidify before we needed to transport the cake to the birthday party. So, toothpicks are holding the broken web in place.
Ta-da!
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