The Ultimate Cake Wreck

Last week Aston had a birthday party in the park. It poured with rain beforehand and at one stage we were thinking of canceling. The rain stopped, praise God, and the kids had heaps of fun splashing in puddles! Here is the cake I made.

It looks impressive doesn't it? It's even more impressive when you know it's the second "red and green rocket cake" that I made!

I was very organized and baked the cake on Thursday ready to decorate on Friday afternoon, so far so good. I cut out the template (from my super edition of the Women's Weekly Kids Party Cakes Book), made a big batch of buttercream icing and got out the food colouring.

Not wanting my buttercream to go too runny I had bought proper gel food colouring from a cake decorating supplies store on eBay. I also knew that this type of colouring would have a better chance at turning the icing bright red.

Apparently I was wrong. I added a few drops of food colouring, the icing was pink, so I added some more, still it was not red so I added more and kept on adding more until I used the whole bottle! Even then it was not quite red but I decided it would have to do.

I finished icing the cake and put it in the fridge ready to add the finishing touches after dinner. By this time the kitchen was varying shades of red as were my hands (it's a week later and I still have pink under my nails)! As I was cleaning up I decided to taste some of the left over red icing.

It was terrible! It had a really strong toxic taste to it like it had been mixed with nail polish remover! It turns out food colouring does have a taste to it when used in large concentrations!

I panicked. I cried. I Facebooked and then tried to fix it.

I went to the shop in search of red things, I bought liquid red food colouring, red jelly crystals, desiccated coconut, and hoped some kind of inspiration would strike. (I had a brief moment where i thought about changing the colour of the rocket but my client had been very specific in what colours he wanted).

Initially I tried to scrape the icing off the cake but when I tasted the top layer the evil toxic taste had seeped into it, so I started again.

It was finished by 11pm which is not too bad, working with a warm cake is tricky though as it kept crumbling. I tried to colour the new buttercream with the red food colouring but it turned out a lovely shade of pink so I used the food colouring to dye the coconut and spread that on top.

Aston was very happy with his cake and still doesn't know I made it twice.