Madhouse recipe : Pierre's Spiderman Birthday Cake

You don't turn 4 years old every day so I knew I needed to rise to the occasion and try something a bit out of the ordinary. Pierre is big into Spiderman and Cars so I decided to see if I could come up with something vaguely resembling either of those. I found inspiration in this Spiderman cake on the Baking Mad website.

Now I knew I wouldn't be able to produce anything this good because I didn't have any ready to roll icing or edible gel pens in the cupboard but here's what I came up with.

Pierre's Spiderman Birthday Cake

ingredients :

150g margarine

150g soft brown sugar

50g caster sugar

1 pod of vanilla paste

3 eggs

225g plain flour

1 sachet baking powder/raising agent

Additional Ingredients

To Decorate:

a big dollop of margarine
icing sugar (as much as you need to get the right consistency)
red and black food colouring

Method :

Beat the sugar and margarine together. (I usually do this by hand but am testing out my James Martin hand mixer at the moment - it does do the job extremely quickly, avoid arm ache and create a lovely light, fluffy cake batter.)

Mix in the vanilla paste. Add the eggs, one at a time, and the flour/baking powder. Mix to a smooth consistency and pour into a greased baking tin. Bake on a low heat (150°) in a preheated oven for 45 minutes. Check it is cooked by pressing the top - if it springs back, it's ready but if it stays indented, it needs a bit longer.

As I didn't have any ready-to-roll icing (apart from blue - not ideal for making Spiderman !), I decided to have a go making coloured butter icing. Not great in this heat because it stayed very soft. I blended margarine and icing sugar then added food colouring to make red and black, leaving a little bit white for the eyes.

Well, it's not perfect but it's not bad ! We used chocolate letters to spell out a special birthday message - "Joyeux anniversaire Pierre !" The birthday boy thought it was great and recognised him instantly so that was the main thing !

The cake is nice but quite bland so it's the perfect base for all that butter icing. I was worried it would be too sickly but it wasn't.

Other blogposts you may be interested in :

 Asda Home Baking Cake Pop Kit review

The Madhouse version of Eric Lanlard's Baking Mad Light Fruit Loaf

Whitworths Sugar Baking Challenge recipe #2 : Crunchy Honeycomb