War And Peas

I love this design and thought it would look awesome as a cake. I decided to go with a really rich chocolate cake and that is where the trouble started. I had melted chocolate in the cake, in the ganach and piped to make the barbed wire...but it is winter in Australia at the moment and without heating my kitchen is probably somewhere near 10 degrees. This meant that most of the time the chocolate was setting again before I was able to finish what I was doing with it. This was really evident in the piping as it would set and block the bag half way through piping, or it would set as soon as it was piped before I had a chance to add the barbs!!! Oh well...I think they still worked out in the end!

I had hoped the cake would have been taller to give me extra room to shape hills and the trench out of but the sculpting still worked out well. Once the ganach was poured on I stuck the set barbed wire into it. Once this was done I used sugar modelling paste I had coloured green to roll my peas, then used some more of the paste and through trial and error come up with a way to make the helmets that worked well. I decided to add some peas that had unfortunately passed to the large freezer in the sky due to squashing, impaling themselves on barb wire and drowning in mud in the trench to the cake for some added interest. It was quite hard to get a good photo as the ganach and the barb wire are the same colour though.

The cake is really dense and delicious especially topped with all that chocolaty goodness. It is coming to work tomorrow for all to enjoy and make sure I don’t have a sugar overdose!