Batman Cake

Na na na na na na na na na na na na na na - Batman!

It's been a while since I've made a cake, but I had a chance to design and decorate a cake recently for a friend's family birthday celebration. Thankfully my friend gave me full reign to figure that the design of the cake, I love coming up with my own plan for the cakes.

I enjoy all the aspects of making a cake, but one of my favorite parts is trying to envision and design the cake in my mind. I am not a talented illustrator, so I usually leave the ideas in my mind and don't draw them on paper. I find sometimes the idea doesn't translate to the paper quite like I envisioned in my head. This is especially true if I try to get too complicated and make it very busy. Sometimes a busy cake works for a particular design, but most the time less really is more! I was pleased with the more simplistic design of this cake, it came out looking like what I pictured in my mind. Thankfully the family I made it for was pleased with the taste and the look!

Here's how I made the cake:

• Bake an 8 inch cake of your favorite recipe. I used my all-time favorite chocolate cake, but my second favorite choice is this doctored white cake recipe. 
• Mix together ingredients to create a buttercream for the cake, my favorite is my tweaked version of the standard Wilton buttercream. 
• Add a little black food gel to the icing (start with the size of a kernel of corn and add small bits if needed) 
• Mix the black coloring in to create a gray shade of your choice, don't fully combine the color though, you want to leave some swirls to resemble the night sky and add some dimension to it. 
• Cover the cake with buttercream and smooth using a spatula, or a fondant smoother and non-design paper towel . 
• Dye a marble size of white fondant yellow, or use yellow fondant. 
• Roll yellow fondant out to 1/16th of an inch and cut out an oval shape (I printed out a Batman logo to make sure I got the dimensions right). 
• Roll black fondant paper thin and cut out a batman shape (again I used a printout, I couldn't freehand that as well). 
• Place the yellow fondant on the cake and position the black symbol on top. If neither piece of fondant has hardened much it should stick easily to the yellow. If not, use a small dab of water to help the symbol stay in place. 
• Roll out long strips of black fondant and cut out a skyscraper shape. I did about four building for each strip of fondant. I alternated between short, tall, pointed roof, etc. Once you have one set done, you could use that as a template to create the others if you want a repeated pattern. 
• Using the leftover yellow fondant, create small squares to represent the lighted windows of the building. These can be easily created by flattening a tiny ball of fondant and then trimming the sides to make it square. Place these on the buildings. These should stick to the fondant, but you can use a small dab of water if they are having trouble staying on. 
• Let the buildings set around 30 mins and then carefully place around cake. 

You can also create the fondant pieces ahead of time and save some time on the day you decorate the cake.