Baby Elephant Cake

Here's another one we tried out, with the same recipe as the Rocking Horse cake!!

Rocking Horse Cake

Well this one sure wasn't easy! We started off with a plan to make a Minnie Mouse cake, but the cake tin scared us off. Too much frosting and too many colours. Since this was for my 2 year old niece, we wanted to completely avoid food colouring. So we stuck to chocolate and plain frosting and a marble cake, that's her favourite!

So here's the recipe for the Marble cake. We'd planned to layer the cake but chickened out. What if it cracked! It was a super soft cake anyway, and the glaze + the frosting helped keep it moist.

• 4 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon and 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 cups white sugar
• 1 cup butter, softened
• 4 eggs
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 2 cups milk
• 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C). Grease and flour pan.
2. Mix flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, butter , eggs, vanilla extract and milk in bowl. Beat slowly to moisten, then beat with an electric mixer at medium speed for about 2 minutes until smooth. Keep aside 3/4 of the batter; pour the remainder into another bowl.
3. Stir cocoa into the 3/4 portion of batter. Drop by spoonfuls into pan. Alternate with the plain batter. Using a knife or skewer, gently swirl the cocoa batter into the white batter.
4. Bake in preheated oven for 40 -45 minutes, until an inserted wooden pick comes out clean. Mine took about 45 minutes but check when it's about 35 minutes and then keep it in the oven a while longer if it's not done yet. 

Once the cake cools transfer it on to the cake board that you intend to serve it on. Before that, if the cake has risen too much, you could trim it a bit so that it stays flat on the board. Also, that way you have something to munch on while baking :)

Glazing the cake before frosting it is a good idea. All you need is Icing sugar and water (room temperature would do). Gradually mix in water, one teaspoon at a time till the mixture coats the back of a spoon. Then pour it over the cake, covering it completely. You could line the base with strips of foil so that once you're done you just pull the strips off and your base is clean! The glaze icing takes about 2 hours to set. I had to use about 500 gms of icing sugar for this cake.

For first time frosting makers, this website might help. 

Frosting

We used regular frosting, and not strawberry. So just use the same proportions, just leave out the strawberry. How much frosting you need, of course, depends on the cake time. But for this cake we used about 350 grams of chocolate icing sugar and the same amount of plain icing sugar. 

Once the glaze icing had set, we drew outlines and then filled it in with frosting. The base of the rocking horse was filled in with sprinkles since we ran out of frosting :)

Here are some more pics!

Comments please!!