Superman Vanilla Cupcakes & Victoria Sandwich
My sister Helen planned an amazing surprise party for her boyfriend's 21st this year and I offered to take care of the desserts and of course, his cake. He is a huge fan of superman (mainly the whole 'look' not the actual television programme!) so she decided to have this as a theme. After discussing plans with Helen, she thought that a cake shaped and iced like the Superman logo would be the best and probably simplest thing to do, although I later found that this was still quite a challenge! She also came across some photos of Superman cupcakes online and I just couldn't resist having a go at making them myself.
I made a batch of vanilla cupcakes using a recipe from Joy of Baking and decorated them using vanilla butter icing. I made the icing blue by using icing paste colour but boy did it take a lot of paste to get it the right colour! In fact, I added so much that when people ate them, their teeth turned slightly blue-oops! Luckily, I think everybody was having such a great time that they failed to notice-phew! The superman logos on each cupcake were actually cut out of marzipan that I coloured yellow. I then made up some red fondant icing and iced on the 's' shape, which was actually much simpler than I thought. I was able to do all this in advance, saving me a lot of time on the day! They turned out looking much better than I thought they might do, and everybody seemed quite impressed, especially Rabbi!
Now, moving on to the actual cake. I found it quite difficult scaling up my Victoria sponge recipe to make a 12" square cake. In the end I made an estimate and luckily it turned out to be spot on! To make the Superman logo shape, I simply cut off one of the corners. The two halves were filled with a generous amount of vanilla butter icing and strawberry jam, which I also spread around the edges to neaten the cake up ready for the roll out icing.
That was the easy part. I have never iced a cake this big with roll out icing and I found it very challenging. Unfortunately I over estimated the size of the cake and rolled out the icing too thin. When I tried to lift the icing to cover the cake, it was so heavy that it stretched even more so I had a lot left over! I was not happy with how the cake looked at this point because the icing seemed to have cracked and wrinkled, giving it a rough finish. However, at this stage it was too late to rectify the problem so I just carried on regardless.
Now as if covering the cake was hard enough, I now had to attempt doing run-out, again a technique I have never done before. Luckily my mum was on hand to help me with this, otherwise it could have been a complete disaster! I did have a slight problem because the icing did literally 'run-out' of the outline I had drawn so unfortunately there were a few icing stains on the side of the cake making it look a bit messy. However, I managed to cover up a few of my mistakes by wrapping a piece of red ribbon around the bottom of the cake!
Although I wasn't completely happy with the end result, nobody at the party seemed to notice and thought it was amazing- especially Rabbi!
Me and Rabbi
Rabbi and his cake
