I made a Pokeball cake last summer for my nephews.
If you’re a fan of lots of pictures in blog posts then this one probably isn’t for you.
I haven’t detailed the bits like crumb coating mainly because I forgot to take pictures… and there are only so many pictures you can take of a Pokeball anyway!
Now myself and fondant aren’t really friends. We don’t really know each other well enough to be friends. We’ve worked together a couple of times but we didn’t really click, so we’ve avoided each other at the water cooler ever since.
Except things changed. I needed fondant for this cake. The time had come to put our differences aside to make this project work, so I sent fondant a polite email, and we decided to just get on with things.
I made the cake (vanilla sponge) following a recipe from the Lakeland website. In their recipe they have made a ladybird cake – one I might try to do at some point because it’s actually really cute.
I filled it, crumb coated it, and iced it. Fondant and I got on okay; I’m not sure we’re best of friends but we worked together quite successfully I thought, and the icing bit actually went quite. There weren’t any cracks and the fondant looked fairly smooth. This is because I’d run over my buttercream crumb coat with a knife that had been dipped in boiling water, just to make sure it was smooth. I thought of that all by myself, you know.
Then came the drama – transporting it. I’ve even put this in a fancy quote so it stands out so you understand how dramatic it was.
I had previously thought the most stressful cake journey I’d carried out was driving cakes across my work car park (aka a 4×4 off road course). I was wrong. It turns out the most stressful cake journeys are where you have to transport a round cake covered in buttercream and fondant icing for an hour and a half in a hot car in July.
You see I made this for my nephew as part of a belated birthday celebration and took it from my house to my brothers house…
I set out onto the motorway, getting along nicely for the first part of the journey.
With 40 miles left to go, I looked down and the cake was wobbling. What if it falls over? Can a legitimate reason for pulling onto the hard shoulder be for a cake emergency?
A sudden thought about ten minutes later: what am I going to do if the fondant just melts off the cake? Should I have done the fondant bit when I arrived instead? No don’t be stupid, you can’t put fondant on a cake in the boot of a car parked on a London street. There’s nowhere to roll the fondant out!
At 25 miles left to go, signs appeared saying “CAUTION CONGESTION”. Well, let me say this loud and clear in case anyone from Highways England is reading this: THE ONLY REASON THERE IS CONGESTION IS BECAUSE YOU MAKE EVERYONE GO FROM DRIVING AT 70 TO DRIVING AT 40 AT VERY SHORT NOTICE. Ps I hate you.
We were driving slowly for a long time, which didn’t help my stress, but eventually we picked up speed and we were off again. The cake was wobbling, I was wobbling, I was also hungry which wasn’t helping matters.
Surely this journey can’t get anymore stressful! You’re thinking.
Well you’d be wrong. Because I forgot that the last mile to my brothers house is mainly made up of speedbumps. It was a dark time. I don’t think I’ve ever driven as slowly. I looked at the cake between every speed bump. I was a woman on the edge.
Thankfully, we got there and both the cake and I were intact. Neither of us cried which is the sign of a good day, and the stress of the journey was all forgotten when my nephew opened the door and saw me and the cake. He was so surprised and both my nephews were impressed with my efforts. They’re great.
I was worried it would be dense but it wasn’t; everyone enjoyed it, then I went home. When I did a test run of the cake it did perhaps perhaps perhaps taste a little more eggy than usual but with all the sweetness from the jam, buttercream and fondant you couldn’t really taste it.
Onto the evaluation:
Did it look like a Pokeball? Yes!
Did it collapse on the journey? No!
Is it the best Pokeball cake that’s ever existed? Lord, no. But still, it’s the first round cake I’ve ever made and I’m pretty chuffed with the results.
Things I’ve learned from this experience
1. It’s harder than you think to make a Pokeball cake
2. Don’t put a cake in a car in July