Michael's, a national chain of craft stores, carries some great character cake pans. Above is a Spongebob cake I made for Thanksgiving - chocolate cake with buttercream icing. Since this was my first time making a character cake, I used the Wilton recipe for buttercream for the white areas of the cake, but soon felt comfortable enough to use my own buttercream recipe to pipe the colored areas. Though the Wilton recipe provides the greatest stability and ease of decoration, it contains shortening and artificial flavors which I would rather not feed my friends. My own buttercream is a simple mix of unsalted butter, powdered sugar, and natural vanilla. I was a little nervous about using butter rather than shortening because the cake needed to survive 12 hours in the car without refrigeration - this is not a food safety issue, but melted frosting was a real possibility. Fortunately, the cake arrived at its destination intact and looking just as it had when I had completed the decoration.
As you can see, I cut a custom backboard for the cake. To do this, I traced the character pan on a cake board before filling it with batter, then cut out the shape and covered it with foil. The reason it does not match up well with the contours of the cake is because I covered the wrong side with foil so the board is backward. Oops!
Another mistake to watch out for when making a character cake is overfilling the cake pan. Every character pan comes with specific directions, including how much batter should be poured into the pan before baking. Multitasking as I baked my cake, I did notice that the character pan called for one box of cake mix. I prefer to use my own recipe for cake batter to better utilize pure and whole ingredients, so I thought I would just make one regular batch of batter. After doing so and pouring it in the character pan, I noticed that the level of batter seemed a little low, so I mixed up another batch of chocolate cake batter and poured that in as well. I don't know what I was thinking, but I kept pouring until the character pan was full to the brim with batter, then placed it in the oven on a cookie sheet. Thank goodness for that cookie sheet because I think you can guess what happened next. As the batter began to bake, it overflowed the sides of the pan and filled the cookie sheet because I had in fact used twice as much batter as necessary. The cake-splosion was a little messy, but delicious, to clean up, and my second try turned out much better as seen above. I have learned my lesson - one batch of batter per character pan unless otherwise specified!
