How to make a hedgie cake

I love it when my friends have birthdays because it gives me an excuse to decorate a cake for them.

This time it was my good friend Elliot. Elliot is OBSESSED with his little hedgehog Maru. So it was obvious what kind of cake I was going to make. Now Maru has many shapes, from round to pie-like, but I thought this pose would lend itself to a cake the best.

The cake base

I looked for an egg-shaped cake pan around but since it’s not easter time, i couldn’t find one. What I ended up doing was taking two 9″ rounds, and cutting them into pieces to form the Maru shape, and holding them together with “frosting” cement in three layers. I have pictures, but I’m not sure I want to post them. As you know from Ace of Cakes is that the guts of the cake are rather gory, and it’s almost better to preserve the mystery.

Maru with crumb coat

Here is the cake assembled with a thin frosting coat (called the crumb coat)  to hold it together, and to make a smooth base for the decoration. I chose to put a dark layer on the back side, to approximate the dark undercolor of Maru’s fur.

Maru cake with crumb coat

Quills layer

Now ideally, I’d have had some thick tip to make Maru quills. However, to get them to the proper texture, I’d have had to make the frosting way thicker than would have been tasty. And since I like people to actually EAT the cake in addition to enjoying how it looks, I chose to do something a little different. I used a basketweave frosting tip to put the Maru “quills” on. Also, in the frosting decoration bag, I put in one half gray frosting, and one half white, so when I piped it out, I would get a sort of “striped” effect. It got a little TOO stripey in some places. oops!

Maru cake with some fur

Fur from the side

Maru face time!

Now with all the quills/fur on, it’s time for some personality. If I had to do it over I’d have done the ears less round, and less pink, but I’m a perfectionist.

Maru cake with a face!

And finally, the cake with the happy birthday boy!

Ecstatic birthday boy Elliot with cake!

Cake decorating lessons learned:

• Fur: to make fur lie properly, start doing the fur layers at the back, and move to the front.
• Work with small amounts of frosting: work with chilled buttercream frosting in small amounts. Because if the bag is too full, the warmth of your hand as you work almost starts to melt the frosting, and it doesn’t set up properly.
• Make more cake than you think you’ll need. I could have built a better hedgie face if I’d had more cake.
• Make more frosting than you think you’ll need: I blended colors and when I made a wrong color I had blended too much of it, and had to go to the store to get more butter, totally throwing off the hedgie creative process!
• Last and most important: YOU DON’T NEED TO EAT FROSTING THAT’S LEFT OVER