Pollock

Once again, I responded to the siren-song of my food dyes and decided to go for (literally), a splash of colour. I liked the Pollock design, so I decided to give it a try, but with my own spin. Instead of having Pollock standing on the canvas with his paintbrush and bucket, it'd be me with a piping tube. A fitting way to finish up this year's entries

First, I had to make "myself". A little editing of the source image gave it the right look. I then printed it, placed it under some parchment and drew over the lines using melted dark chocolate applied with a toothpick (the lines were way too fine to pipe and the design was already a little bigger than I wanted it to be). Once that was dry, I filled it in with some melted white chocolate and went to bake the cake.

Sticking to past form, I made a Victoria sponge cake and baked it in a rectangular tin. But somewhere between making the batter and pouring it into the tin, a little artistic inspiration took over and I busted out the food dyes. I separated the batter into bowls, left one plain and dyed the other ones yellow, pink, blue and black (black was achieved by mixing brown, purple and blue). I dropped spoonfuls of the coloured batter into the tin at random and then dragged a knife through it for a nice pollock-y effect.

Once the cake had baked and cooled, I covered it with royal icing so that I'd have a nice smooth canvas that wouldn't give me trouble with colour-bleeding. I left both the cake and the chocolate figure overnight to solidify and took it back up the next day. I attached the figure to the cake using some chocolate icing left over form a previous project, but hit a bit of a snag. The colours looked completely wrong. The white wasn't white enough and the black wasn't black enough. This was soon fixed by applying some white and black writing icing with (you guessed it!) a toothpick. Once the figure was secure, I set to the fun part, the Pollock painting.

I've had problems with colour-bleeding while working with glace icing in the past, so I used white chocolate icing that I tinted to match the colours in the original design. I had originally planned to recreate the design, but the piping instruments I had at my disposal made this rather difficult, so I decided to embrace the spirit of the artist and just go nuts. I watered down the bowls of icing a little and started dribbling it on from spoons. I *may* have gone a tad overboard with it, but the artist in me wouldn't let me stop (plus I knew I'd end up eating the left-over icing, never a good idea at 1am).

I left it all to dry overnight and am happy to report that there were no issues with colour-bleeding. The royal icing made it a little difficult to cut into, but it tasted pretty good (albeit a little sweeter than I'd like) and was definately worth the effort