A quick little post this week to show you guys a cake I made for a 5th birthday. The brief was for a TMNT cake with just the little heads poking through the manhole. The other request was to not make the cake too sweet. I was honestly more nervous about this part than anything. You can’t simply cut out the sugar without changing the texture of the cake, and then there’s all that icing!

I decided to drop the sugar amount by about 15% and substituted half the caster sugar with raw sugar. They wanted a red velvet cake so I used an oil-based blended recipe like this one to give me more flexibility with the sugar amount.

I started off with 3 layers of red velvet cake and sandwiched them with a vanilla buttercream. A little different from the standard cream cheese pairing but far more stable in the Aussie heat.

Then a crumb coat of buttercream and a thin layer of fondant.

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They’d given me a couple of ideas for what they wanted for the sides of the cake, but the one I liked most was the cityscape. I had a lot of fun painting the sky. Perhaps I was more channelling my desire to do a galaxy cake than anything.

Last of all I added some silhouettes for buildings, the lettering and the turtles.

The base they wanted decorated but left that up to me. And really it wouldn’t be TMNT without a pizza reference somewhere. They *loved* the pizza base and it was a lot of fun to make.

Alfie loved the cake as well. When it was revealed to him at his birthday party I’m told he could not stop laughing. Of course the kids demolished the sugar turtles. Thankfully the adults didn’t find the cake too sweet and absolutely loved the whole thing. Phew!