Liz’s Birthday: Triathlon Cake

Liz’s birthday was this week, and she said she wanted the chocolate cake from the Joy of Vegan Baking.  It’s amazingly easy to make, we’ve used it for a few occasions, and always comes out really well.

I really wanted to decorate it in a way that means something to her, and at the same time was worried, because I don’t have much of a steady hand when it comes to icing a cake.  A quick Google image search for ‘bicycle cake’ confirmed my fears – unless you’re a pastry chef, there’s precious little chance of making something that looks like a bike!

I had been thinking about other ways of decorating it, and then Liz’s coworker made her a beautiful fondant covered cake, which got me to thinking that maybe I could use fondant to achieve what I wanted, since it would let me cut stuff and arrange it before I put it on the cake (the finality of icing bags makes me nervous!  One twitch, and your cake changes from a picture of a bike into something postmodern and vaguely frightening).  A bit of looking around confirmed that you either make fondant from gelatin and sugar, or cooked marshmallows (aka, gelatin and sugar).  There are some vegan recipes out there, but they all looked either tricky or unreliable, and I didn’t find many people saying that fondant was actually delicious regardless of how you make it.

So, the logical conclusion was marzipan, which has always seemed entirely delicious to me, and is something that I know Liz likes.  Luckily, based on the numbers coming to the party, we needed three cakes (I can’t imagine the cosmic connection between the number of people at a party and the number of events in a triathlon, but I’m sure it’s there!).  And, not only that  – I had a mix of cake pan sizes (two eight-inch, one nine-inch) , and Liz’s favourite thing ever is the bike event, which falls in the middle of the famous ‘swim, bike, run’, so that got the larger cake and saved the symmetry.

Anyway, the result came out just how I wanted it – and Liz seemed happy too, which is of course the whole point. Happy birthday baby!