SCRUMMY LOAF & BLT SANDWICH
WHAT IS IT? A chocolate hazelnut loaf cake, sandwiched together with peanut butter icing, covered in fondant and airbrushed with edible paint to look like bread, then ‘ sliced’ to make a BLT sandwich filled with ‘ bacon’, ‘ lettuce’ and ‘tomato’ moulded from coloured shapes of fondant icing.
FIDDLY EQUIPMENT: An airbrush gun. This is a cross between a fountain pen and a blow torch. You put a few drops of edible ink into a filter on the ‘ pen’, plug it into the mains, point the nib of the pen at the cake and press ‘go’. It fires tiny particles of ink in an even spray like an aerosol.
The cheapest I found is from Enfield-based baking supplier
pmecake.co.uk — it’s £56 for the gun and £2.60 each for the inks, which come in every colour under the sun. HOW TO MAKE IT: I made two 2lb loaves of chocolate hazelnut sponge, and sandwiched them together with peanut butter buttercream.
Next, I used a bread knife to slice the sides and edges into the shape of a loaf, before covering the rest of the cake in buttercream.
I then rolled out a sheet of white fondant icing and covered the entire ‘loaf’ with it, before using the air gun to spray it brown like a loaf. The technique is very hit and miss. I managed to spray most of my kitchen.
THE TRICKY BIT: Assembling the sandwich. I made my ‘lettuce’, ‘ bacon’ and ‘ tomato’ from coloured fondant blocks of icing (£1.89 each from Lakeland), and painted in the details using the edible paint.
My ‘mayonnaise’ was yet more buttercream. It’s very fiddly — lots of rolling, moulding and attention to detail — and I felt a bit like a five-year-old modelling my lunch out of plasticine.
TASTE TEST: The fondant pieces are too sickly sweet for my liking, so the sandwich wasn’t as tasty as it looked, which is a real shame as I adore BLTs.
Such quantities of edible paint also makes it a bit sticky to taste. The cake, though, is rather delicious — rich, nutty chocolate sponge encased in peanut butter. CAKE OR ILLUSION? Definitely an illusion. Even from up close this looks like a loaf of bread, thanks to the clever airbrushing gun. In fact, by the end, I was really craving a sandwich.