Say it with Skulls

Okay, so I said I'd never bake again, and yet here I am with another cakey offering. But I did stick to my absolute refusal to use icing ever again - this time it's chocolate. Serious chocolate. Seven pounds of chocolate to be exact (that's just over 3 kilos for you metric people). In total the cake weighed 21 pounds. Yes, 21 pounds (nearly 10 kilos) of chocolatey goodness. I shudder to think how many calories were involved.

This is a 21st birthday cake for my son. Originally I was just going to make a guitar cake, but I wanted to do a full size one and, as we live in the same house, I couldn't work out quite how to manage something of that size in secret. And I wanted to do something a bit different. Let's face it, there are loads of guitar cakes out there, but you don't see many cakes with skulls.

Hmm. Can't for the life of me think why.

Sorry, but I don't have an actual tutorial for this. I'm too impatient to get the thing done and stopping to take photos just spoils the mood. Not to mention that melted chocolate and cameras really don't mix. Not if you want your camera to remain in working order anyway. But I can tell you how to make it if you really want to know. 

I should start by pointing out that this is not a cheap cake to make. You could make it cheaper by using a lower grade of chocolate, but then it wouldn't taste very nice, so why bother? Also, chocolate isn't particularly difficult to work with, but painting chocolate isn't straightforward and it does require a degree of skill.

There are several basic elements to this cake:

Moulding

The skulls were made using a one-piece latex mould and the chocolate was built up in layers. Moulding is fairly straightforward; melt the chocolate and pour enough into the mould to coat the inside. You will need to tilt the mould to spread the chocolate around. Check carefully to make sure you don't have any air bubbles - pop them with a cocktail stick if you do see any, and tap the mould gently. It helps to sit the mould inside a container so that the shape doesn't distort while it sets - I found a jug worked well for the larger skulls and a mug for the smaller ones. You can refrigerate the mould to speed the setting, or even put it in the freezer if you're in a rush. Once the chocolate is set, repeat the process to add a second layer. Make sure your chocolate isn't too hot though as it will melt the first layer. It should be coolish, but still runny.

A quick word about latex moulds. They're not easy to remove, so make sure your chocolate is thick enough that it doesn't crack when you're trying to stretch the mould to peel it back. I had to get quite brutal to remove the chocolate skull from the mould as the mould would only stretch so far before snapping back into place. Make sure you have a minimum of 3 layers of chocolate and a thickness of at least half a centimetre all around. And it's vital that your chocolate is fully set before attempting this. Once you get it out of the mould, store the sculpture in a plastic ziplock bag and keep in a cool place until you're ready to decorate it.

The guitars were done in a plastic mould about a centimetre and a half deep. I filled these in one go and refrigerated them until they were set. They came out of the mould easily, though the necks were prone to snapping as they were much thinner than the guitar body.

If you want to make your own moulds there are plenty of instructions on the net to show you how.

Sculpted decorations

It might surprise you to know that there is such a thing as modelling chocolate. There are even recipes for making your own, but I couldn't get these to work for me. Apparently the type of chocolate you use makes a big difference to the success of the recipe. Most of the recipes on the net are american and british chocolate is a very different animal to american chocolate, so after a few miserable failures I bought some readymade from Squires Kitchen. Basically, if you can model with Fimo, Plasticine or clay, you can model with chocolate, and there's a really good video showing you how to sculpt roses here.

Painting with chocolate

This, for me, was the hardest part, with the steepest learning curve as there's relatively little about it on the net. Here are the basics, discovered very much by trial and error:

You can not colour chocolate with normal liquid food colouring as it causes the chocolate to turn stiff and lumpy. You have to use either powdered food colouring or oil-based food colouring. Fortunately these are relatively easy to find. All of my decorations were made from white chocolate so that the colours would show up well.

Being thick and sticky, painting with coloured chocolate is not really practical, although if you want your decoration in only one or two colours it's very easy to colour melted chocolate and pour it into your mould.

The easiest method by far is to paint with coloured cocoa butter. You can buy food-grade cocoa butter in block or chip form; it melts easily, is nice and thin in consistency and colours easily with oil or powder colouring. It's not as easy to work with as normal paint though, so don't be fooled. For one thing, cocoa butter is solid at room temperature so you can only paint small areas at any one time and you need to keep your prepared colours warm. I melted a batch of cocoa butter chips in the microwave and used this to mix up individual colours in shot glasses, keeping the paint liquid by standing them in a flat-bottomed dish of hot water, which I replenished regularly. I used one paintbrush for each colour as it was almost impossible to get the brushes clean without soap, and kept them in a jug of hot water to stop the hairs going solid when not in use. It's also important to wipe the water off the brush before dipping in the cocoa butter. The colour tends to be quite translucent, so you need to either build the layers up to get a strong colour, or use a blobbing motion to apply the paint thickly. You can also paint directly into the mould and then top up with chocolate once the paint is dry.

The sculpting chocolate was coloured with powdered food colouring. Quite a lot was needed to get the deeper colours and it did make the sculpting chocolate slightly sticky to work with. You can use cornflour or icing sugar to coat your hands with if this is a problem.

Cake baking

I rarely bake, so I didn’t have a good chocolate cake recipe to hand. Added to that I had read that large, multi-layered cakes could collapse under their own weight and needed a fairly dense cake mixture for support and that they also required dowelling (wooden rods) to be pushed through the cake to stop the layers from sliding. Trust me, there were no wooden rods going inside my cake! The solution? Glue it together with so much chocolate that it wouldn’t be sliding anywhere. Did I mention there were 7 pounds of chocolate on this cake? Now you know why. It tastes much better than wooden rods.

The cake mix was a different matter. I went for a rich, dense chocolate wedding cake recipe from the BBC Good Food website. It’s costly to make (and if you look at the ingredients you’ll see why) but it tastes great, is really moist and freezes very well.

Assembling

The cake was baked in advance, frozen and defrosted the day before assembling. All the decorations were also painted in advance. Each layer was cut into 3 and filled with chocolate ganache. The bottom layer was placed on the cake board and covered with a thick layer of melted milk chocolate spread out with a pallet knife. The second layer was placed on top, thus gluing it into position with the chocolate and more milk chocolate was poured over - ditto the top layer. I let the chocolate set slightly and then poured another layer over the entire cake, smoothed it out, then left it to set.

Phase 2 was the white chocolate. This was melted then poured over the cake carefully so that it formed runs and dribbles. I did not smooth it. Once I was happy with the effect I started to stick on the decorations before the chocolate set. Some repositioning was required which made a slight mess of the white chocolate, so I poured a little more over any messy areas, taking care that this didn’t run over decorations lower down on the cake. I didn’t move the cake at all until everything had fully set. In order to keep the cake board clean of all that melted chocolate, I cut several short strips of greaseproof paper (baking parchment) and slid these under the edges of the bottom cake layer, removing them once the chocolate had set. I had to cut through the chocolate round the base of the cake first though to get a neat edge.

Overall, the cake took about 5 weeks to complete. Most of that was secretly making the decorations. The skulls and guitars took a whole morning to cast and because of the number of moulds I could only make one of each at any one time. Painting was really time-consuming - there's probably about 8 hours work in each of the large skulls and 2 to 3 in each guitar (and I made about double the quantity that I ended up using on the cake). I spent around 7 hours sculpting the hand-made roses. The cake itself took around 2 hours to bake for each layer - the largest layer took closer to 3 hours. They were baked in advance and frozen, and took 24 hours to defrost. Icing and assembling took about 5 hours.

So, the verdict - sculpting and painting with chocolate is messy, fiddly and time-consuming. Oh, and expensive. But it's worth it.