WATERMELON CAKE WITH CHOCOLATE CHIP PIPS
WHAT IS IT? A bright red, watermelonshaped, syrup-infused, domed sponge, studded with chocolate chip ‘pips’ and covered with fondant icing painted in different shades of green.
FIDDLY EQUIPMENT: Edible food paint (£12.99 from Lakeland) and assorted brushes (£8.99, Lakeland). You’ll also need two domed cake tins, sometimes called ‘hemisphere pans’, which cost around £12.99 each.
HOW TO MAKE IT: Flo’s original recipe uses three 20cm round sponges as well as one large domed cake, stacked on top of one another and sandwiched with watermelon syrup and buttercream. I decided to use two domed tins and one round tin for the middle section to make the watermelon look curved underneath, though this did make it difficult to stand the cake on its end, and it kept rolling over. The hardest part is getting the colour right: mine took two 28ml bottles of red food colouring, and it still looked a lot paler than Flo’s. Once baked, I stacked the sponges and
slathered the whole sphere in buttercream, which acts as a glue and keeps the fondant icing in place. Flo suggests using 1kg of white fondant icing (around £3 for 500g from most supermarkets), which I rolled out to half a centimetre thick and draped over the sphere, before smoothing it down.
THE TRICKY BIT: Painting the watermelon. I started with pale green, then painted darker stripes on top, before sponging the whole thing down with kitchen roll to give a more natural effect to the skin. By the end I was up to my elbows in green paint and looked like the Incredible Hulk — but the cake was pretty convincing.
TASTE TEST: The sponge was dry and the excess of red food colouring gave it an earthy, almost bitter flavour. But the lashings of buttercream made it sweeter, and the fondant icing is pure sugar. It will leave you with a green tongue, though, which can put you off tucking into a second slice.
CAKE OR ILLUSION? The shock of red sponge when you slice into the cake is a showstopper — but it’s still clearly a cake, and mine was definitely a bit wonky.