I love scrabble and so does my best friend’s mum, a fabulous and fun woman about to turn 70. So, A Scrabble cake was requested for her surprise birthday party. What ensued on the day of decorating was a nine-hour adventure in fondant.
As four pre-baked Moroccan Orange and Cardamom cakes thawed, I beat my buttercream and made the board on which the cake would be mounted. The cakes were sawed and squished together with a layers of orange blossom-infused buttercream.
Now to fondant, with which I have little experience. Rolling pin at the ready and an icing sugar dusted bench, I began kneading and then rolling my kilo of ivory fondant. Now to transport it onto the cake, I applied a technique that my dad uses with his pizza dough, gently fold it quarters then move it and gently unfold it. Note to self, this is not a suitable mode of transportation for fondant! I had caused what I now know to be, elephant skin, and I spent the next hour trying, without success, to remedy the cracked and wrinkly texture.
I plodded on with decorating my ivory elephant, using an edible ink pen to draw the outline and scoring the fondant to create the grid. Next up were the colourful squares for the double and triple word and letter scores. These, thankfully, came along with relative ease and were “glued” onto the cake with a fingertip of milk. My left hand hovered above the cake and square-by-square scribed the writing as neat as I could.
Now to make some letter tiles, how does one make light brown fondant? Brown usually results from a mix of loads of colours, so in went red, yellow and black. It turned a vague grey colour… plan B was to puff in a load of coco powder. Success! Once the powder was mixed in I had a pale brown fondant with a nice chocolatey aroma.
Luckily “HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEBS” fits nicely together on the Scrabble board. Letter tiles placed, a few extras for the side, and the last thing to do was a notepad.
I’m pleased to say the end result was decent, you could hardly notice the elephant skin and it was ogled at and then devoured at the party. Fondant adventure achieved.