Ultimate Cakespeare

No, I'm sorry, this does not involve throwing cake far distances at people, animals or inanimate objects.

This is a much more exciting kind of Cakespeare! The kind in the image of William Shakespeare's face!

This past week theatre-lovers and Shakespeare-fanatics alike celebrated the birthday of the prolific and talented Bard.  At the University of Delaware, the group E-52 Student Theatre has a day long celebration of his birth called "24 Hours of Shakespeare", during which Shakespeare's many plays and sonnets are read the entire day!  This year, in honor of this pastime, I made a fairly epic cake.

Now, I am often one to belittle sheet cake as seeming too simple; however, I have rethought my opinion and have decided that sheet cake can be very nearly as complicated as any other decorated cake if you are not just covering it in frosting and tiny icing roses. (Although, I don't actually know how to make icing roses yet, so maybe I shouldn't knock it till I try it...)

For this particular cake, I actually used two different sheet cakes.  One was a Butter Pound Cake.  Seriously, this was delicious.  Buttery and dense and amazing.  I found the recipe on allrecipes.com and I certainly would use it again, but I wouldn't mind seeing if I could tweak it a bit.

Butter Pound Cake

• 1 cup butter
• 6 eggs
• 3 cups white sugar
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 pint heavy whipping cream (This is what the recipe called for, but I actually used 1 1/2 cups whipping cream and a 1/2 cup of half & half, this worked just fine and probably reduced the calorie count by about... 12 calories or so)
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 2 teaspoons lemon extract

The recipe wanted me to make it in a tube pan, but I figured as long as I watched it in the sheet pan, I'd be fine (this was true).  Something that the recipe does not call for, that I did, was the beating of the egg whites.  I have really started making this a habit because I have noticed that the cakes really do seem more fluffy and delicious because of it... or at the very least, the cake batters do (which is really just as important because the people hanging around while you make cake will always be more excited about your finished product if the "taste tests" they get along the way are fantastic).  

I also made a Chocolate Butter Cake.  Despite the word butter in the name, this cake is surprisingly light (or at least it is light for a chocolate cake).  This recipe came from joyofbaking.com a while ago.  I have been using the recipe successfully for quite some time.

Chocolate Butter Cake

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate, chopped

1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)

1 cup boiling water

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup unsalted butter, room temperature

2 cups granulated white sugar

3 large eggs

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

1 cup milk

I'm going to make a confession here.  I was just looking over the recipe and thought to myself, "Unsalted butter, ew."  That is because unsalted butter is disgusting and I never use it.  Well, I did once and didn't notice any difference at all, so I am just going to use salted butter all the time (especially since I use butter for more than just baking and who wants to eat unsalted butter on toast. that is gross).

Ok, back to Cakespeare.  Once I finished the two sheet cakes, I noticed they were kind of flat.  I had never made a sheet cake before (in fact I just bought the pan on Friday) and wasn't sure how much batter you needed to put into it to get a good height on the cake.  Since I was using two kinds of cake for one sheet cake, I cut the cakes in half and stacked them on top of each other.  I didn't put anything in between the layers because I didn't want a frosting overload.  In retrospect, this may not have been the best idea because it made keeping the cake together while slicing a little difficult.

These cakes were refrigerated overnight so that I could work with them as easily as possible.  After doing the stacking, I made a mixture of powdered sugar and milk to spread on top of them.  This made it easier for me to frost the cakes later with real icing because it kept the little crumblies in check.  This was really only important for the chocolate cake because the pound cake was so dense that it didn't have crumblies... After that I refrigerated it again while I mixed the frosting colors.

I used three different frostings for this cake:

1. Lemon Citrus Buttercream (for the pound cake)

For this I just made a standard Buttercream and mixed it with some lime juice, lemon juice, lemon zest, lime zest, and orange extract.  Seriously heavy on the citrus.  I didn't really measure anything, but I did spend a lot of time adding sugar or lemon juice to taste.  It was pretty zesty :)

2. Almond Cream Cheese frosting (for the chocolate cake)

This was actually Neufchatel cheese instead of cream cheese... but it is basically the same.  All I did for this was mix the cheese with some powdered sugar and milk and then throw in some almond extract until you could taste the deliciousness.  It was really simple and VERY creamy.

3. Simple Buttercream (for the gold border and writing)

After making a Buttercream frosting, all I did was add food coloring.  I wanted to make something that wouldn't conflict with the two other frostings that much, but that was uniform around the whole cake.

The two different frostings on top of the cake are why the textures look different on the two halves.

 Now, once the frostings were ready and the cake was finished drying after its royal icing bath, I was ready to frost the cake.  But how was I going to frost William Shakespeare's head free form???  I wasn't.  I created William Shakespeare stencils.  I drew out the basic outline of what I wanted things to look like on some computer paper and then I cut out pieces as needed.  The following picture shows how I frosted his face: 

I did this for both sides of the cake until it looked like this:

Tip: Do not try to use a "hair" frosting tip if you have put lemon and lime zest into your frosting... it is not successful.  Well, ok, it was kinda successful, but I had to clean the tip and change disposable bags about 4 times.  It did however give Cakespeare's hair and beard a nice texture.

After finishing the base frosting, I had to move on to the intimidating part: drawing a face.

Now, I can draw decently well if I have an image in front of me to go from, like this one:

But that is usually on paper... drawing on cake with frosting in a different matter entirely.  But it actually wasn't as bad as I was expecting.  Except maybe the lips, lips are weird in general.

I first drew on his goatee.  I did that with a kitchen brush in small strokes.  Then I did his lips.  They were really hard to get right, but I think that in the end they turned out ok, particularly with the mustache on top.  The mustache was fun and easy; the only tricky thing there was putting the middle of it in the right place in order to maintain the correct perspective on the picture.  I used the brush for that too.

For his nose, I used a mixture of the frosting I used for his face and the frosting I used for his hair.  It gave it a good color to do shading with.  I even included the nostrils :)  For his nose, mouth, and eyes, I used the pointy end of the kitchen brush, but anything pointy will probably do.  It worked well for doing the details.

You may also notice that he has an earring in the original image.  That is not missing from the cake either!  I used a lighter version of the black frosting that I used for his shirt to put on his earring.

After all that, I had to do his eyes.  I made the eyebrows first, extending from the top of the nose.  Then I drew on the top of his eyelids.  This had a really amusing affect that I would like to share:

He's a happy LOLspeare!

After drawing on his eyelids, I drew on the bottom of his eyes, the filled in the whites where I thought they should go.  I made his irises a reddish-brown (since I had a reddish-brown already made) and then put some black frosting in the middle of them.  So that Shakespeare would look more lively, I added a tiny white dot to the pupils, like in animated movies and things like that.

After that, I piped on a simple yellow border.  I'm not sure what tip I used, mostly just because I don't know their names... it looked like a three-pronged star.  Then for the outside of the cake, I did a basket weave!  

I had seen this on Thursday while looking for recipes and I was so excited to be able to try it.  It made the cake look very interesting :) at least, more interesting than if I had just spread some frosting out on the sides.  And voila! We have a Cakespeare.

Ok, things I learned from this cake:

1. Beating egg whites first and then folding them into the batter is a wonderful idea.

2. Pound cake is the most delicious thing created by man.

3. If you want your cake to look more uniform, use the same type of icing throughout (i.e. use buttercream everywhere or use cream cheese everywhere, but maybe not both).  However, if you are just going for taste, then do whatever is delicious.

4. It is easier than one might think to draw a face on a cake.

5. If you would like your basket weave to cover all of the exposed cake, make your first layer of strips closer together.

6. If you put your cake on a sheet of parchment paper... tape the parchment paper to the cardboard base before attempting transport... otherwise, you will be having cake-related heart attacks the entire drive as your cake slides all over the box.

7. Cake boxes are great.

8. People sometimes don't want to eat your cake right away if it is the image of William Shakespeare's face.  Tell them, "It's cake! It is for eating!"  They will often listen to you:

 Happy Birthday, Shakespeare!