Piece of cake?
We find out how hard it really is to make Bake Off’s showstopper...* (*very!)
Freddie Mercury missing a chin and neck, Bob Marley minus a mouth, an ancient Louis Theroux? Yes, the first showstoppers of this year’s The Great British Bake Off really did leave a bad taste.
Surely baking a cake bust of a celebrity can’t be that hard... can it?
I was challenged to give it a go and decided that the new host Matt Lucas would be the face on my bake.
Matt replaced Sandi Toksvig as Noel Fielding’s co-host, alongside judges Paul Hollywood and Prue Leith, as the show returned to Channel 4 with a whopping 6.9 million viewers on Tuesday.
So would my bake be a showstopper or a soggy-bottomed disaster?
On your marks, get set, BAKE!
Getting started
Make a cake they said. Easy.
As the mum of two young girls, I have made birthday cakes in the shape of Rapunzel’s tower, fairy castles, and a unicorn, and others on a theme of Frozen and LEGO. And they had turned out okay – or so I thought.
But I had never made a face before, so it was time to call expert Lara Mason, whose crazy, life-size creations include cakes of Ed Sheeran, Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, Mickey Mouse, Moana and Willy Wonka.
Lara started off telling me: “Keep your ingredients at room temperature, always line the cake tin, use a special sponge flour, cook low and slow and check the consistency.”
Great advice, but I needed to start with the basics – buying more sugar and at least 20 eggs and finding the loose bottoms to my cake tins that had disappeared to the back of my cupboards.
Next, I got all my ingredients weighed out and into bowls, just like they do on the show. At least
I had the posh food mixer – maybe that would help. Goodness knows I was going to need it. I had decided to make a lemon layered sponge cake.
Luckily I had lemons in the fridge for my cheeky weekend G&Ts.
Bake!
What I hadn’t realised was that I needed to make five cakes, so it would be big enough to carve out a head. On Bake Off, they have four hours from start to finish to make their creations.
My oven only holds two cakes at a time and they take 40 minutes, so this was going to be a challenge in itself. Could I borrow a neighbour’s oven? Perhaps, but they were out.
After what seemed an age, I finally put in the last of the cakes. I didn’t have the show’s presenters giving me time checks, so I used the alarm on my phone and a stopwatch.
Chill
What’s next? Lara tells me: “Make your buttercream, I use butter, icing sugar and a little bit of boiling water.” Then she dropped a bombshell. “Don’t forget to cover it in chocolate ganache as it makes it firmer.”
My heart sank faster than the third – very deflated-looking – cake I’d made. I didn’t have any chocolate or cream. Too late now. I decided to keep going and hope for the best. Lara said to use wooden sticks and cardboard circles covered in foil to strengthen the layers. Now that, I could do. Years of making –
sorry, helping to make – last-minute school projects would help. I grabbed some scissors and a box of Coco Pops and, hey presto, cardboard circles.
Lara then said chilling the cake would make it easier to carve.
Hmm. I’d just had a Tesco delivery, so my freezer was full. But needs must, so I took out Quorn fillets, ice cream and shelves to fit in the cake.
Thirty minutes should do it? Right? Wrong. The cake wouldn’t all fit in, so I had to do half at a time.
By this time, my girls had come back from school and wondered why the kitchen looked like a bomb site. And why their dinner was frozen and stacked in the corner.
Face facts
I had no idea where to start carving the face. Lara suggested I print out a picture of Matt, cut it out and pin it to the side of the cake and mark out his features with cocktail sticks. It looked like a voodoo ritual was taking place.
Next, I needed to mould his nose and ears out of icing before putting on the final layer of fondant icing.
She advised: “Use a bit of water to stick on the fondant. Use cornflour instead of icing sugar to roll out the icing as it makes it less sticky.” I ended up having to stick bits of cake into holes I’d gouged out. The cake ended up looking like Matt was wearing a helmet at one point.
I realised I didn’t have flesh colour for his skin. Cue an urgent call to Lara.
“Don’t panic. Just use a little bit of pink and brown and mix that.”
My first efforts made Matt look like he’d been on a very long holiday. So I just used a tiny bit of baby pink which wasn’t a bad match I thought. After rolling out some of my fondant placed it on the head.
Disaster. The fondant ripped and I poked the eyes through his forehead.
I made another batch. This time the fondant stayed put and I got the eyes in the right place. But there were several folds in the icing.
My youngest waltzed in and nodded knowingly: “Queen Victoria. You’re making her. It looks great.” My heart
I sank. I found a smoothing tool and Matt’s bald head started to take shape.
Final touches
Putting Matt’s fondant glasses in the freezer made them easier to place, then I used edible ink to draw his eyes and mouth.
Trickier than it sounds as the colour seeped. I stuck the glasses on with edible glue and Matt’s eyes started to weep – probably in despair.
Verdict
My eldest daughter took one look and declared: “It’s Dobby from Harry Potter. It’s brilliant, Mum. Well done.”
Still, it tasted OK and at least I had a lemon left for my badly-needed gin.
Find Lara’s amazing creations on Facebook at Lara Mason Cake Art