A Cake for my "Little Brother"

We celebrated our new baby's one month birthday this past weekend as well as my brother's birthday. My mom bought the baby's cake and I promised to make my brother's cake.

Big bonus if you can guess what the cake design was from this picture alone:

Here's a hint: my adult brother and I still adore this character that we remember fondly from our youth and teenage years.

Here's another hint: this loveable claymation character has always enjoyed a cult following in much of Asia.

I'll give you some time to think on it.

In the meantime, I'll give you the details of the cake. I used my all time favourite chocolate cake recipe by Martha, Devil's Food Cake with Chocolate Ganache. This cake is everything I love about chocolate cake - moist, fluffy, dark chocolate cake plus lots of rich and smooth frosting.

The original recipe calls for a two tier cake with half of the prepared ganache whipped into frosting and the other half drizzled over the cake as a glaze. I usually make it a three or four layer cake, forego the ganache glaze and whip all of the ganache into frosting. This makes a truly decadent and irresistibly delicious chocolate cake. However, with the new baby at home plus the two boys and the fact that I still had marshmallow fondant to make/cut/decorate, I decided to cut down on my work load and just make the suggested two layer cake.

If you've ever wanted to make a cake using fondant, I would definitely suggest using marshmallow fondant. It's much easier to make than conventional fondant and much tastier and easier to work with than store-bought fondant. Check out CakeJournal for a quick and simple tutorial on making marshmallow fondant using store-bought marshmallows. Or you can make it from scratch by using a marshmallow recipe like this one from Apartment Therapy the kitchn, and simply adding icing sugar to the marshmallow cream (instead of letting it cure and set into marshmallows) until the fondant becomes workable.

Okay, curious about what the cake design was yet?

Simple Pingu Cake :)

PINGU!

Unfortunately there are no pictures of the interior of the cake, since every slice was quickly devoured and the birthday boy claimed all the leftover cake for his takeaway bag. You'll have to take my (and my disappointed-that-there-was-no-leftover-cake-for-the-next-morning hubby's) word for it - it was to die for [back-patting] :)