Let s Plant

I saw the design for Let's Plant and decided I had just had to bake that one. It was a little challenging to figure out what to use for my cake since I decided I wanted to make it without using any fondant at all. I love the finished look fondant can create, but I was hoping to do almost as well just using other materials. I had originally decided to make the buildings out of cake and then coat them in chocolate somehow. Once I realised just how much chocolate would be needed for that, I decided to just use icing.

I made lemon poppy seed pound cake for the buildings but once I found that what I had made was very thin, I also made an american sponge cake to increase the bulk. i proceeded to make buttercream icing to use in between the layers I would use in the buildings.

My dinosaur is made of rice crispy square material that is coated in modelling chocolate. I was happy with the results of that. The dinosaur's eyes, mouth, and spines were made out of plain white chocolate that had been coloured. The same chocolate was used to make the trees atop all of the buildings.

Assembling the whole thing was also a challenge because I had to make sure none of the towers would fall over. By the end of it I was running out of cake and had to use rice crispy square material to raise some of the cake pieces in the back buildings so that they were a bit taller. I put buttercream down to have the cake stick and then alternated pound and sponge cake layers for my buildings. I would generally start and finish with the pound cake in order to give it a better shape. In one of the buildings, I tried to put a rice crispy square material core in order to increase the structure but it didn't do much to help and that tactic was abandoned. Finally, I made up coloured whipped cream for the outside of the cake and then decorated it with my dinosaur and the trees.