The Annual Frog Cake Competition
Apparently, Siri can recommend you stuff. I discovered this one glorious day after opening Safari on my MacBook Air (unfortunately, this post is not sponsored). Anyway, my gal Siri recommended me a Wikipedia page with the quirky little name "Frog cake". I like frogs. After all, I'm making a game about them. I also like cakes, not so much making them, but I decided to give these South Australian sweeties a try.
With my birthday coming up, this small cooking DIY project seemed like a swell idea. My corrupted brain immediately started thinking about all the nice content I could produce for Frogs & Mushies, and, in a way, I'm doing so now. Little did I know there's a reason why frog cakes are expensive (around 5$ a piece). They're not as basic as they seem! #justice4frogcakes
First of all, there is no recipe on the Internet whatsoever. Okay, I found one blog post but it made frog cakes look too complex, and I wasn't ready for this or giving up. Thus, this ingredient list based on Wikipedia's description was born:
- One premade sponge cake
- Raspberry jam
- One pack of whipped cream (the liquid type you whip yourself)
- Premade fondant (green, classic frog color)
When it comes to measurements, we eyeballed literally all of them. So, our sponge cake was precut horizontally in three layers, so we cut it vertically into nine squares and ended up making 13 two-layer cakes. I'm not superstitious but this number might be the reason for the soon-approaching failure.
Not just yet, though. The next two steps were quite simple: 1) spread the jam between two layers (I keep calling them tiers in my head, but it's too lush of a term for this sadness); 2) apply even blobs of whipped cream on top of the cakes. We found a tip that if you add a little bit of sugar to the cream after whisking it, it'll hold it's shape longer. If, for whatever reason, you decide to do so before... It'll prevent protein from clumping up leaving your whipped cream liquid. Science, you know.
Sebbe (our CTO) was the one in charge of rolling out the fondant, while I was busy painting red-tipped matches with a black marker (you'll see why very soon). After some time, the said officer came in with some bad news. There wasn't enough fondant to cover all 13 cakes. I jumped to the conclusion that it'd only be enough for like three cakes, but we ended up covering eight of them, which is fine. Note to self: ask CTO to elaborate before jumping to conclusions. Reiterate your questions if needed. He's a very literal man.
Now, to the actual cake covering technique. In a nutshell, we struggled. Our fondant proved to be very stiff and wouldn't necessarily follow the desired shape of the frog cake, which is a square base and a round head. We developed two polar techniques for tackling this issue: Sebbe's approach was to chip the sticking out parts (primarily corners), and I made four cuts and bent the corners, causing them to overlap.
Without further ado, here you can find a reel with the process and upbeat cutesy music to cover up the despair going on backstage.
I'll leave these to your judgement, dear readers. I am biased towards these cakes but not necessarily in a positive way. The taste was, um, questionably too sweet mostly because of the fondant. Regardless of how this attempt went, we decided to announce The Annual Frog Cake Competition, even though this one was us vs. the cakes themselves. We'll use marzipan next time. We'll prevail.