Cricket Cake

As you may, or may not, know it's Gary's birthday today and I decided to make him 2 cakes. Lucky boy!! I wanted to make a simple cake that focused more on flavours and a more complex cake, which will be posted later.

The simple cake was to be decorated with a few cricket pieces but I was going to try some new techniques. First was the sponge it's self. He wanted raspberry and white chocolate flavours so the tricky thing was to get these flavours to balance. White chocolate is quite a subtle flavour and I was afraid it'd be dominated by the raspberry. I made a vanilla sponge and then stirred in 200g of chopped white chocolate. I then added some raspberries and stirred these in carefully to try and maintain their shape and structure.

For the icing I made Italian merringue butter cream. I will post how to make this at a later date, and stirred in some homemade raspberry curd, again will post about this later. I filled the cake with icing and also gave it a coating in the raspberry icing. 

I then made a white chocolate ganache by heating some double cream and adding white chocolate to melt in. Ideally I would have done a 4:1 ratio of chocolate to cream but I didn't have enough chocolate so I used a 2.5:1 ratio. This seemed to work fine and I had a thick chocolate mixture. I spread this over the cake and left it to set. I then covered this is green sugar paste and smoothed it, creating a crisp edge. 

I made a bat, ball and stumps out of sugar paste and stuck these on the top. 

Finished cake

Overall the cake looked ok, it was very simple. I could have put more details on the cake if I'd had some more tools, which I don't, but it was ok. The icing was too thick and so towards the edges the balance wasn't right. However, if you had a slice from the middle it was much better. 

Internal view