Category: Fan Cakes
Penny's Frozen Yogurt Cake
Ah, sweet Penny. Finding the perfect cakey icon for Penny was not easy. Red hair? Nobody wants hair cake. A laundry basket? Too mundane. A copy of The Toy Collector? Too obscure. A chunk of shrapnel?
Hey, that’s not funny.
Alrighty then, frozen yogurt it is. Penny loves it and considering the container, it’s even a little cake-shaped.
What a crazy random happenstance.
Be forewarned. I made the “Penny Cake” three times. The first two times were complete and utter failures. I very much wanted the cake to be buttercream frosting (not fondant), but the buttercream cake… it did not look good — there was cracking. There was oozing. There was cake looking like…
It’s too horrible to mention. And not “horrible” in a good way.
This final version is much easier than what I tried previously, but know that getting the “yogurt” portion of the cake to look good is… more challenging than you may think.
If you want an easy cake, go for Captain Hammer’s Cake. But if you’re committed to having a “Penny Cake”, read on.
Supplies for Penny’s Cake
- 2 – 8″ inch round layers of any flavor cake
- White buttercream frosting
- Royal Icing
- Whipped Frosting (see notes below)
- Gel Food Coloring: Pink, Burgundy, Golden Yellow, and Leaf Green
- Pastry Bag (or any food safe plastic bag with corner cut off)
- Small piping tip (#1, 2, or 3)
- Wax Paper
- Fondant
- Spork Pattern
- Large Serving Spoon
Carve the sides of the stacked layers at a slight angle.
Stack two unfrosted cake layers and carve the sides at a slight angle (the shape of a styrofoam cup). If the top layer is domed, don’t worry about it — this is one time it’s good to have the dome as it will reduce the swirling mound of frosting the top of this cake needs.
Once you’re satisfied with the shape, it’s time to add support.
Normally, a two layer cake doesn’t require stacking supports, but you just reduced the size of the supporting layer — to avoid the bitter disappointment of a collapsing cake, follow Pix’s stacking tips and frost the cake with a light coat of buttercream.
Once you have the cake coated in buttercream, roll out white fondant long enough to wrap around the cake in a width approximately 1/2″ more than the height of the cake. Wrap the fondant around the cake.
Martha Stewart's Whipped Frosting
Now here’s the tough part, the “frozen yogurt”. It’s frosting, but that much buttercream would be… too much buttercream. There, I said it. There
can be too much buttercream. The best answer to this dilemma is a very light whipped frosting.
Which is something I don’t normally make. So I hit Google and found this recipe on the Martha Stewart site. There were negative comments about the recipe, but it looked perfect to me.
Other than needing two batches, I had no problems with the recipe and it is wonderfully light. Perhaps too light for a general frosting, but perfect to replicate a mountain of frozen yogurt. One caution: no way I would attempt to whip this by hand. It took my stand mixer (with the whisk attachment) cranked to “8″ to make it form stiff peaks.
And one other caution: if you use this frosting, don’t expect it to survive a summer picnic. As well as this frosting works, it will melt in heat. More so than buttercream.
Whatever frosting you use, put it in a piping bag (or large plastic bag) and cut off the tip (or a corner) so that you leave an opening of about 1.5″. Pipe the frosting into a towering spiral.
Piping the label with colored Royal Icing.
If you’ve watched the show closely (very closely), you know that the styrofoam cups of “frozen yogurt” come with a crooked “Berri Good” label. For this cake, the label is made from Royal Icing affixed to a strip of fondant.
Now you know that I’m all about providing patterns to download — but “Berri Good!” is a corporate trademark. And I don’t know how they feel about fan cakes, so you’ll need to Google the name and get your own pattern of the logo.
Print out the logo. Place a piece of wax paper over the logo and pipe Royal Icing onto the wax paper. If you’re like me (and don’t do a lot of piping of Royal Icing), pipe multiple copies. This way you can pick and choose the best letters and replace any letters that break when you’re applying them to the fondant.
And there will be breakage.
Allow the piped letters to dry for up to 24 hours and then peel them off of the wax paper.
Use thinned Royal Icing to attach letters to fondant.
Attach the letters to the strip of fondant by using a toothpick or paintbrush to apply thinned royal icing to the back of the letters and then placing them on the fondant.
Royal Icing Letters Fail
Once you’ve attached all the letters of the logo onto the strip of fondant, allow it to dry for 10-15 minutes before attempting to attach the fondant to the cake. Otherwise, you end up with letters falling off and having to replace them.
Once the label has dried for 10-15 minutes, lightly moisten the back of the label and place it on the cake. Apply light pressure for 30 seconds.
Download the spork pattern in PDF format.
Download the
spork pattern. Roll out white fondant to a thickness ~1/8″. Use the pattern to cut a spork from the fondant.
Supplies for making the Spork
Use shortening or butter to grease the serving spoon. Mold the fondant spork to the serving spoon. Once the fondant has dried, remove it from the spoon.
And be very very careful with your fondant spork. I broke three of them. The weak point is the bend in the spork — fondant isn’t strong enough to bear the weight of the spoon bowl.
So don’t go waving your spork about.
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Tags: dr. horrible’s sing-along blog, Fan Cakes, penny
