Hello, you may wonder why a title saying Reine de Saba crocodile birthday cake. Well, this weekend was my 4 y.o daughter’s birthday party. She had asked for a chocolate cake, all good, easy I thought. Well, two days before the asked it to be in the shape of a crocodile. A bit more planning and thinking was suddenly required. I am not an expert at cake in all shapes and colours, I grew up with traditional round birthday cakes,no fuss!
The thing with young children is that most of the time, the birthday cakes end up in the bin. If there is an icing, they go for that only. And at a 4 y.o. birthday party, parents come along and generally would not touch the cake to avoid loading up on sugar. So, my challenge was to bake a single cake and make it work and reduce wastes. And it worked! Look at that happy face!
The other success is that because the recipe is not too sweet, it got eaten by all and there was not much left overs.
The challenged explained
I advise taking a large sheet of paper, a big pen and your baking tin (here a roasting pan) and start drawing options. In the end, I chose between a curly crocodile and a straight one (2/3 width for the body, 1/3 width for the tail).
Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba Cake)
This is the base recipe. I would double for an afternoon tea cake. For my crocodile, I multiplied the proportions by 4.
Ingredients
- 75 g of white or caster sugar
- 50 g of plain flour
- 1/3 sachet of raising powder or 1/3 teaspoon if using it from the box
- 75 g of dark cooking chocolate (if you are using a 70% cocoa chocolate, decrease the chocolate quantity to 60 g, it would be too strong for children).
- 60 g of butter
- 2 egg yolks and 2 egg white beaten to snow.
Method
- Heat the oven to 180 °Celsius.
- Butter and flour a tin, or butter and line.
- Melt the butter and chocolate together.
- Mix in the sugar, then the egg yolks one at the time.
- Add the flour and raising powder together, being careful not to create any lumps.
- Fold in the egg whites (in snow) gently.
- Transfer to the baking tin and insert in the oven.
- Cook until dry in the center (20 to 30 min depending on ovens and thickness of the cake in the tin)
Decoration
Using the model cut the cake to shape. Place on a long dish or like me, just tape two pieces of cardboard together and cover (and tape underneath) with baking paper.
Green Icing
My icing was based on mascarpone, a bit of icing sugar (to your taste, not too much) and some green food colorant. You will need either a stand mixer or some beaters or even a good whisks. Once well mixes, spread evenly with a flat cake spatula.
Spine butter cream
The spine was butter cream. 125 g of soft butter, 1/2 cup of icing sugar and a mix of green food colorant with a point of red (to make it a different green than the body). Mix well again with your stand mixer, whisk or electrical beaters. Use a piping bag to make the spine.
Eyes, claws and teeth
Roll some white fondant and cut to shape, they will stick by themselves on the mascarpone “icing”. For the middle of the egg, I had some mini smarties handy. You could also use a couple sultanas.
The crocodile fairly shorter!
