Barbie Birthday Cake and Cup Cakes

Another celebration this week, my daughter turned 6! She had been counting down the days since her last birthday. She loves Barbie, and requested a Barbie cake.  Her cake was a bit of an experiment, black is one of those colours you just can’t produce when following the failsafe diet. The black food colourings have too many number in that we try to avoid. I have adapted so many cake designs in the past to get around not having black. A few months ago on one of the Failsafe Facebook groups Kerryn and Rachael mentioned how they had successfully made black icing using charcoal capsules! Brilliant idea… but is it safe to use?

Charcoal is mainly used to treat poisonings and reduce intestinal gas (flatulence). The capsules I bought from the pharmacy say “Aids in the treatment of Flatulence”, and I can’t find anything on line to say it’s really detrimental to you, although it does say on the bottle that it “may cause darkening of faeces and caution with children as it may interfere with absorption of nutrients”.   So keeping that in mind, it is really only an occasional thing when going on a birthday cake. I personally don’t know if I would use it to colour a whole cake black, but just as elements to decorate. It also didn’t alter the taste of the fondant in any way.

Jodi also mentioned that she used the Hooper black 100’s & 1000’s to make icing by soaking the colour off them. This is a great idea too and I gave it a go since I purchased some in my last Allergy Train order. This would probably only work for butter icing or sugar icing. Was not successful with fondant unfortunately, made it too moist to work with.

To make the actual cake, I used the White Chocolate Mud Cake recipe and used a 20 cm square pan.  Life was busy in the lead up to the birthday, so I made it 4 days before hand and put it in the freezer. I used Marshmallow Fondant which I made the day before I decorated the cake to give it time to rest before wanting to work with it. I divided the marshmallow fondant into 3, left one white, coloured one pink with Hopper Pink Natural food colouring (this is coloured with fruit and veg rather than numbers, moderate salicylates), and the third I made black.

The full directions for making the  Marshmallow Fondant is on this link. Once the fondant has had a chance to rest, you can add the colour to it by kneading it through. I had trouble pulling the charcoal capsules apart, so I just snipped the top off with kitchen scissors and tipped the powder into a well I made in the fondant with my fingers and folded and kneaded the powder through it. I used about 4 capsules, adding one at a time until I reached the desired colour, and the fondant actually went even darker after a while.  I used the template on Sew Darn Cute for the Barbie silhouette. I printed it out on paper the size I wanted, cut it out with scissors, then placed it on the fondant that I had rolled out already. I don’t have much in the way of cake tools yet, so I just used a steak knife to carefully follow the paper and cut the shape out of the fondant. The pink sides of the cake I scored on the diagonal with a clean ruler at 2 cm intervals to give a criss cross effect and placed a Hopper Silver Pearl on each cross.

For the Barbie Cup Cakes, I made a triple batch of the “Too Easy Chocolate Cake” from the Thermomix Everyday Cookbook and replaced the cocoa with brown sugar to make caramel cup cakes. The blue cup cake pans were left over from my sons Shark birthday and I bought some pink ones from $2 from a cheap shop. The icing is a simple Butter icing which I doubled so I had enough to pipe the icing onto 24 cup cakes.

The Barbie cake toppers were easy to make. I am a scrapbooker, so used the supplies I had on hand, black, pink and blue card stock, circle punches and scalloped scissors I borrowed from a friend. The paddle pop sticks I also bought for $2 from a cheap shop. I printed out on a A4 sheet of paper 12 of the Barbie sillohette’s and 12 of the letter B’s. Using my circle punches to punch them out, then the next size circle up to punch out the black. The pink and blue I cut 2 punch sizes larger so I could cut out with the scalloped scissors to give them a decorate edge. Attach to the paddle pop stick with double sided tape between the black and coloured card stock to hide it.  Adding toppers like this looks effective and saves on having to find  edible decorations to add to cup cakes.