Significant others birthday's are always hard. Guys have a tendency to buy whatever they want and not even think about waiting til after their birthday. In this particular instance, I did have to steer him away from shops and make broad hints that buying something just in advance of his birthday wasn't the best idea. Add to that pressure from previous awesome presents and it requires months of planning.
Even if choosing a present was hard, selecting the cake to make was easy. My bf is a big fan of iron man and after I saw a super cute picture of a wedding cake with a little spider man poking out I knew exactly what I was going to do.
The cake itself was a four layered chocolate caramel ombre cake (recipe here) The mix itself is absolutely delicious and my friend (acting as my baking assistant and much appreciated company) and I had to stop ourselves eating it uncooked. Thankfully the cake itself was just as delicious when cooked and constructed. Though I may have made a salted caramel sauce or chocolate ganache for layering rather than just the plain caramel which was a little intense.
Iron man was constructed of yellow and red sugar paste with a little blue and white for features and built directly onto the cake plate (there would have been no moving him!). We found the image of a plastic figurine on google and used that as a template. Thankfully, only head, shoulders and arms required which was about the extent of my artistic talent but I was very happy with how he turned out.
Very scary lifting the four layered cake onto the top of the little Iron Man but finally it rested on top and it was time for icing.
For the chocolate icing, I initially made a home made marshmallow chocolate fondant (recipe here) However, when it came to rolling this out to put over the top of the cake, it kept cracking very badly. Thankfully, kneading some ready made white fondant into the mix gave it enough elasticity that we could roll it out and over the cake. Handy tip - when using chocolate icing, use cocoa instead of icing sugar to avoid streaks.
Two people were definitely required for the icing. One person to protect the little figure and the second to actually place and shape the icing. I did make one crucial mistake, namely not covering the cake in the glaze or caramel sauce to give the fondant something to stick to so it did slip a little.
Final touches of using icing pens to write the birthday message and it was done!
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