Snowman Cake

For my January EMS cake, I wanted to do a winter themed cake.  I found my inspiration on Flickr.

I wanted to try new a new flavor, peppermint, but I had difficultly finding the type of recipe I was going for, so I improvised.  I made a vanilla cake and stirred in about 1/2 c. of crushed soft peppermints into the batter.  I tried several ways of crushing the mints and discovered the nut cracker to work the best.  This resulted in tiny pieces that were not crumbs.

When it cooked it added a minty flavor and a little texture to the cake.  Because I used the soft

 mints no one had any trouble eating the cake.  When I turned the cake out of the pans it did look a bit like the cake had acne, but the icing covered up the flaws.

I made my usual recipe of buttercream icing substituting 1 tsp. peppermint extract for the vanilla.  I did not torte the cake, I only put icing between the two layers.  Then I tinted the rest of the icing a pale blue, to look like a winter sky.

For the snowman I rolled out white fondant and cut out three circles in consecutive sizes.  You can see that I used the smaller cutters to cut a piece out of the larger circles so that the pieces would fit together.  

Eyes: Black fondant balls

Buttons: Red fondant balls

Arms: Brown fondant ropes.  I used a knife to split the ends to make the "sticks" fork

Nose: Orange fondant cones.  I scored the cone with a knife so that it would have a carrot texture

Mouth: Red fondant rope

Scarf: Red and purple fondant ropes that I twisted together and then rolled flat.  It is two pieces.  The piece coming over is lightly tucked under the first piece then I used a knife to cut the fringe.

I made the icing and decorating and decorated the cake in under an hour.  If I had planned a little better I would have put a hat on the snowman too.  I wish I had put a border on the cake, but I was worried that too much peppermint icing would be more than people could handle.

Out of all the cakes I have made for EMS, this was their second favorite.  The favorite was the cappuccino cake.