Lego Cake

I hope you aren’t tired of my Lego themed birthday ideas yet-- I have a few more to go! To get ideas for a Lego party, head to google and do a quick search. You’ll find a ton of images that show a multitude of creative ways to bring Lego ideas to life. Most of my ideas this week aren’t original; I’ve taken bits and pieces of projects I’ve seen and combined them into one fun birthday party! I’ll share the ideas here so that someone else might spot something she likes and can turn it into an even better result as the ideas are improved.

Here is a basic attempt at a Lego cake. These cakes are all over the internet, I think even Better Crocker highlights this method on their site too. I don’t suggest it here as a novel idea, but I did learn a tidbit about icing cakes and thought it was worth sharing. I should preface this tip as usual by mentioning that these ideas will help the amateur, home baker; if you already excel at this sort of cake decorating please send more tips my way! I sincerely could use them.

Have you ever had the trouble when icing a cake, that the icing seems to take off the top layer of crumbs of your cake, leaving the icing with bits of cake spread throughout? All of that hard work in baking the cake and wishing it comes out of the pan in (nearly) one piece is then ruined by the icing process. I have that trouble all of the time and have finally made progress towards eradicating it.

After the cake is completely cooled, wrap it in parchment then cover in foil and put it in the freezer. There is no set time for freezing the cake. I have found that freezing it overnight works wonders, although I bet a few hours would suffice too. When the cake is sufficiently frozen, then give the icing a try. Most of the crumbs stay put on the cake and icing is much smoother.

The crumbs you see here in between the Lego studs are from my first attempt-- I used mini muffins for the Lego studs but the proportions were off so I switched gears and used brownies cut into circles instead.

Take this idea one step further: begin by icing the whole cake with the thinnest layer of icing that you can manage. After this initial layer is in place, put the iced cake back into the freezer for another period of time so that the icing sets. Now when you add your final, decorative layer of icing, you are placing one layer of icing on top of the next and the crumbs have already been safely sealed underneath the first layer. Sounds simple but these steps make a big difference.

You’ll notice my cake is not one for a cake competition, there are many flaws. I am still working on how to get the icing to be a smooth layer on the cake without showing my strokes with the offset spatula. I tried one tip that I read somewhere recently: a hairdryer! Yes, I really did lug the hairdryer to the kitchen and tried to melt the outer layer of icing so that it was easier to shape. The efforts worked to an extent; the icing was smoothed slightly but overall I could use some more work on this trick.

By the way, this Lego cake has small circles of brownies that act as the studs on the Lego bricks. I used a cookie cutter to make the small circles, dipped the circles in white chocolate, let it set, then iced them.


Update: Oh what fun! My cake was shared on Everyday Mom Cakes: check it out!
http://everydaymomcakes.com/lego-cake-2/