Kid's Character Cakes



I have made two cakes for Lizzy's 2nd birthday and 3rd birthday using the same technique with dyed white chocolate. The first was a finding Nemo "Dory" cake, and the second, a Tinkerbell cake. They look really neat, but it's extremely easy to do (that's why un-crafty-I can do it!). Anyway, I thought I would share the technique so the wonderful readers of my blog could benefit from it. To start with, find a coloring page of the character your child wants. I just googled "Tinkerbell coloring pages" and was able to pull up lots of pictures to choose from. Print out your coloring page, and place it on an upside-down cookie sheet. Spread a large piece of plastic wrap over the top so that it sticks to the cookie sheet and completely covers the picture. Take about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of regular chocolate chips and microwave them in a small bowl for 30 seconds, stir, and then 30 seconds more. Stir until smooth. Pour the melted chocolate into a sandwich bag, and cut a teeny tiny hole in the corner of the bag. Test out how thick of a line it makes by piping some on to a test napkin... adjust the size of the hole as needed. If you accidentally get your hole too big, just use the other corner and squeeze the chocolate away from the mistake corner. Once you have the perfect size, pipe the chocolate over the outline of the coloring page... this is so easy, it's just tracing! Once you've got all the black lines traced, stick the cookie sheet in the freezer for a few minutes to set up the border. Meanwhile, get out a small bowl for every color that you will be needing, and a sandwich bag for each as well. Put 1/4 to 1/2 cup of white chocolate chips in each bowl, and do one color at a time, microwaving as you did for the dark chocolate. Add the food coloring one drop at a time, stirring, until you get the right color, then pour it into a sandwich bag, snip the corner, and fill in the section of your picture with the appropriate color. Don't worry about it being perfectly smooth on top. Repeat with all the colors until the whole thing is finished. Place the cookie sheet back in the freezer for a few minutes to harden up. Once it is completely set (you'll be able to tell because the chocolate will no longer be shiny), Lift the plastic wrap with the chocolate picture up off the cookie sheet, and, being very careful not to touch the chocolate at all with your fingers, over turn it onto the cold cookie sheet and carefully peel the plastic off the back. Then use a thin spatula or butter knife to carefully place the chocolate character on your cake, rough side down. The side facing up will be the nice smooth side that was against the cookie sheet. Press the character down into the frosting a little bit, and voila! Then, you can decorate and embellish as you want. You can see from the two pictures... Dory was my first try at this, and I didn't do as good a job. I didn't think of doing the border in dark chocolate, so it was kind of messy, and I ended up bordering it after it was on the cake with black decorating gel. The Tinkerbell came out much better, and was much easier to do, since I thought up using the dark chocolate for a border that could set up and then hold the colored white chocolate.

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