Homemade Recipes!

The Cheshire Cat and Aliens

It was my boyfriend's 21st party yesterday, and seen as I was lucky enough to have LOTS of amazingly constructed cakes when I was younger, I decided to follow in my mother's footsteps and make a special one for him (with a fair bit of her help). I searched and searched online for inspiration, passing some off as too difficult (Woody from Toy Story) or too simple (a caterpillar cake) and finally settled on doing the Cheshire Cat from Alice In Wonderland.

I found a picture online, and made a template out of paper, so that once I'd baked the two cakes (vanilla madeira sponge- it lasts longer) I could cut the shape out by placing the template on top. I chose to sandwich them together with jam and buttercream, but if you wanted to make a chocolate cake you could use chocolate spread, or lemon curd if you wanted to make a traditional citrus madeira cake.

I cheated slightly and bought some pre-rolled royal icing, and after putting a bit more buttercream on the top of the cake to act as glue, I placed the icing on top, and moulded it into shape using my fingers, and a bit of water to stick bits together. I'd bought some black icing gel to do the outlines, so I drew the tail on first as it seemed the easiest place to start. I then had the task of trying to make the right shades of pink and purple for the stripes. I only had pink (which was basically red anyway) and blue food colouring, so with great difficulty I reached a colour I thought looked at least slightly purple, even if it wasn't exactly right.

I then painted in the stripes using two thin paintbrushes. I decided to do the face next rather than painting the whole body first, so i moulded some pink food colouring into some more royal icing to make the inside of the ears, the paw and the section around the mouth. I cut two circles for the eyes and stuck them on with buttercream and then iced the pupils, nose and whiskers on with the black gel.

The next bit was a bit of a guessing game. I painted the stripes in one by one, basically stopping once I thought they looked thick enough. The end result looked good though, so at least it worked! The final thing I did was to outline all the stripes with black icing. It made the colour look a lot brighter, and also clearly defined the stripes.

I was really happy with the end product, as was my boyfriend. I also made some little cupcakes that looked like the Toy Story aliens to go with it, simple fairy buns with green icing and white chocolate buttons for eyes. I snipped up some green Haribo sweets to make little ears for them, and after a fruitless search for green laces to use as their antennae, I improvised with spaghetti dyed green with food colouring!