A TMNT birthday party is absolutely nothing without the perfect cake.
Along with my other hobbies and talents, I make cakes. So, when my about-to-be-eight year old girl wanted a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle themed birthday party, I followed through!
Now, I only had one week to plan such an event. And as every little girl's birthday party, it has to be perfect, right? Or else!
The event is tomorrow, and when the day is over, I'll have a post on all the little things that hopefully made the party great. So keep an eye out for that. But since I just finished the cake, I thought maybe I can make my first official DIY post on that.
On with the cake!
Her favorite TMNT character is Donnie, so of course, the cake had to be Donnie. Like I said, I only had one week to plan this thing, with a tight budget no less, so it had to be a semi-simple cake. She and I researched ideas, and there were some amazing TMNT cakes out there probably made by professional bakeries and such. But I'm just me and being me, I have to make it myself.
About eight years ago I took four Wilton cake decorating classes at a local Glendale, CA Michael's. It was awesome and since then, I have not bought a single cake. I've made them all myself; my own wedding cake, all my family members' cakes, others' wedding and birthday cakes, etc.
So, knowing we were on limited time, she thankfully was fine with a Donnie head.
I have a 9" cake pan and baked a dark chocolate cake. Last week I canned a bunch of apricot pineapple jam that my daughter loved (let's call her L). So we added that as the filling. I ended up with about 3 layers of cake after slicing them to size. Next, I tried to carve a turtle head shape, and whatever excess I had, I just piled on top of the face to give it that more rounded look.
It was ugly.
I had made a batch of buttercream icing with kelly green Wilton gel food coloring. L doesn't like icing too much, but with how ugly the crumb coat looked, there's no helping it. It took a lot of icing to make it look nice and smooth.
I had a ton of leftover Wilton fondant from a previous cake, so I rolled some out I had colored with violet gel coloring. With a paring knife, I cut out a rough mask shape. Not perfect, but it works. I took some extra purple fondant and made a 'knot' as seen in the pic.
As you can see, by that point I didn't care if the fondant was smooth and perfect. I just wanted to finish this thing. S (my 1 year old) was screaming for mama!
I cut out some white eye shapes. The left eye looks a little jagged because it got stuck on the counter a bit after rolling it out.
Two brown dots for eyes ( I used an icing tip as a cutter) and white dots for a more realistic look (I used a smaller cake tip for those). The pupils are made with store-bought black writing gel.
L loves Donnie's gap tooth, so this guy had to have a smile. So again, I rolled out some white fondant and took that pairing knife to give it the right shape. I placed the top row of teeth onto the face and used that black gel again with a food only brush to gently fill in the gaps before placing the bottom row.
All in all, it turned out better than I thought!
In the post to come, I'll write about how we made that manhole cover the cake is sitting on.
Party is tomorrow, hope it's a hit!
BOOYAKASHA!
-B