To begin the planning of our cake, me and Danielle sat down in the studio after uni to discuss ideas and what we should do. I told her about my idea of having the cake mexican themed and we decided to go with that. We would name it Type-gato as a play on words with the brief name Typogateux as 'gato' is spanish for cat.
We researched mexican and spanish themed cakes online and found a variety of strange recipes. We then discovered a really nice looking recipe on the Selfridges website and decided to plan via that.
Here are our design planning sheets:
We went out to Morrisons and found all of the ingredients we needed. However when we got back to mine, we remembered we didn't have a cake tin and so we borrowed a glass dish from Sarah Goldthorpe to cook the top of our cake. After that was done, the next day we went to Morrisons again and bought the next set of ingredients for the base as well as the tin. In total we spent £30.56 on ingredients and the tin.
Neither of us had any experience in baking so we thought it'd be really fun but very difficult too, we were absolutely right.
To begin we slowly melted the chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of boiling water to create the main flavour of the cake.
We then cut up our slab of butter and put it in the pan along with our muscovado sugar as well as some vanilla extract.
Danielle was in charge of mixing whilst I prepared other aspects of the cake.
The chocolate melted pretty quickly and it was then left on the side to cool down a bit.
The next part of the fundamentals of our cake were to mix the eggs into the mixture, sifting a table spoon of flour in between the eggs to prevent separation and to dry it out a bit.
Next we had to add the cocoa powder, flour and cinnamon to the mixture. Continuously mixing it together.
After that I poured the freshly made chocolate sauce into that pan to give it the strong chocolate flavour.
My next job was to chop the chillies up very finely and then add them to the mix to give it a kick and a more heightened flavour.
That was it, after greasing and dusting the glass dish we poured in the mixture and put it in the oven for an hour.
Whilst the soon-to-be top section of our cake was in the oven I started on the chocolate icing to cover the cake in, to do this I melted the chocolate and cream together in a saucepan very slowly to make sure there were no lumps. I then proceeded to add icing sugar until thick and glossy until it was done.
Danielle was still pretty exhausted from mixing the ingredients so she took a little nap on the counter.
The buttercream filling was fun to do but I had no idea how much butter went into it! We cut up a slab of butter and added the icing sugar to it, this took a lot of beating. After tasting me and Danielle decided to put the remains of the vanilla extract into the mixture to give it a sweeter flavouring.
After the hour was up, we took the cake out of the oven and it looked perfect. We placed a bowl over the top and cut around it to create the top layer shape of our cake.
To remove it, we cut the surrounding edges into fractions to easily remove the middle.
We left it out to cool and then covered the cake in the chocolate icing.
Finally, after completely coating the cake in chocolate, we let it set in the fridge and then went back to it for me to ice the top displaying the word "Gato". I was really happy how it came out.
After that day's work, Danielle went home to rest and I went to bed in preparation for the next day of baking.
That morning I went to Morrisons to invest in a cake tin as well as some extra ingredients to make a second layer of the cake.
We followed what we did the day before to create the same cake and then poured it into the cake tin and put it in the oven for an hour again.
After it came out, we removed the cake from the tin and flipped it upside down so the top was a flat surface.
We then proceeded to ice the cake with the chocolate covering we made the day before and let it set again.
After about half an hour in the fridge, we layered on the buttercream in the centre of the cake on which we were going to place the top layer we made the day before.
We placed the cake on top of the buttercream and then followed more buttercream around the layer with an icing pipette to give it a more finished look.
After spending a good ten minutes sat admiring our cake, we decided to add some finishing touches to the presentation. First, I began carving some pieces of chocolate into the shape of cat's ears which was a lot harder than I thought it'd be.
And then finally, I decorated the top layer of the cake further by outlining the ears with white icing as well as drawing a nose, mouth and whiskers.
After we'd finished we had some last thoughts on presentation for the competition table, we wanted to explain our cake in a decorative manner and came up with the idea of two description cards to compliment the cake. One explaining what the cake was and the other explaining the meaning behind it.
After finishing the cards, printing them and folding them to make them stand up, everything was ready. The next day we ventured out onto the icy pavements and successfully transported the cake to the studio where we laid it out on the table.
There were some fantastic cakes entered into the competition and it was really enjoyable looking at what everyone else had made and presented.
Sadly we didn't win but there is always next time! Especially after the compliments received from one of the judges.
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