Putting an edible photo on a cake

Last June, I went to the Basque territory with my friend Petra. After gorging ourselves on tapas and cava in San Sebastian, we went to Bilbao for more tapas some culture and visited the Guggenheim.

Here we are in front of Jeff Koon’s Puppy.
My sister said we look like a couple (we’re not, if any fellas are interested).

It happened that I was in luck and there was an exhibition on that I could understand: David Hockney’s The Bigger Picture – paintings of trees in Yorkshire.

As I wandered about looking at the grouped canvases that together made one huge painting, I started thinking about cake (this often happens). Specifically, whether it would be possible to create one large image on a grid of individual cakes. I searched for an occasion and an image to try the experiment. I didn’t have to search far – I was two weeks away from my 40^th birthday and had commissioned a family portrait by Kim Haskins.

The children I forgot to have

Key to the project was getting a large print of the image on sugar paper. I highly recommend Eat Your Photo, who print and post good quality images quickly and at a very reasonable price. They were extremely helpful in getting the right size for the image – I wanted it 15 inches square, which meant printing the image in 4 separate parts. They matched it perfectly.

I bought 25 three inch square cake boards and cut two layers of vanilla sponge slightly smaller than the board, allowing for the 8mm that the sugarpaste would add to the size. Then I simply had to sandwich the two layers together with raspberry jam and buttercream, crumb coat the cake (also known as “dirty icing”, which makes me snigger every time), chill the cakes and cover them with sugarpaste. Twenty five times. What could be more fun on your birthday?

Once all the cakes were iced, I cut the image into 25 three inch square pieces and attached them to the cakes with a tiny bit of edible glue. As the image was already on four separate sheets, some of the cakes had two or even four pieces of sugar paper to attach – you can see the joins on Mia’s face.

If you’re attempting this, try to keep all the pieces in order or at least have a copy of the original to hand, or else you end up with a rapidly disintegrating jigsaw. Sugar paper is delicate – if you have trouble detaching it from its backing, pop it in the freezer for a couple of minutes to dry it out.

The result was a very large cake – here is a photo of the cake next to the painting, and a photo of William next to the painting to give you an idea of scale. Bear in mind he’s a big lad who weighs nearly 6 kg.

Personally I’d struggle to eat a 15 inch square cake on my own but I’d accidentally arranged a party so I had plenty of people to take the cake off my hands. By the end of the night, I only had half a dozen little cakes left. I could manage those on my own.

Painting with cocoa butter

Decorating with cocoa butter is a quick and easy way of getting a complex image onto a cake. All you will need is some cocoa butter, some edible dusts, a cup and saucer and some paintbrushes.

Your biggest challenge is finding cocoa butter as not many cake decorating shops sell it (when I asked in a large national kitchenware shop for cocoa butter, they suggested I try the Body Shop...)

Your best bet is the internet – a 100g packet from Squires costs about £5 and will last for ages. Or you could go mad and buy 3kg from a chocolate supplier. However there’s no chance you’ll use it before it goes past its use by date, unless you think of some alternative uses.

If you’re local to me and would like some of my ample supplies of cocoa butter, please just ask. I’ll put some in a little bag and meet you down a dark alley somewhere. It will look well dodgy.

You will also need some edible dusts, including white. Be careful to use the edible ones, which are clearly marked as such.

<<<<NOT THIS ONE      >>>>THESE ONES. YUM!

You will also need a blank canvas – ice a cake with sugarpaste and leave it to dry overnight. Once dry, the sugar paste has a smooth glossy finish that is ideal for painting.

Put a small amount of the cocoa butter on a saucer over some boiled water – the heat quickly melts it and you can mix in the dusts to create an oil-based paint. By adding white dust to any colour, you create an opaque colour. Without the white, the colour is more transparent.

See how the blue on the right of the saucer is much more opaque than the blue on the left.   

At this point it is handy if you have an artist in the kitchen. Here is my friend Kim Haskins painting one of her beautiful cats onto a fruit cake. You can read about her blog about it here

And here’s a cake that my cousin Helen Hancocks painted last year, copying the "Kate and William" she’d drawn on the invitations for our Not The Royal Wedding Tea Party.

Someone asked me if William was my husband. “Yes! Well, he’s my cat, but yes.." Christ.

If like me you are useless at drawing and your artist has escaped from the cellar, don’t worry: she's unlikely to contact the police and you can simply trace an image onto the cake . Take the image you need, trace it in reverse onto greaseproof paper, then lightly onto the cake. You probably remember this technique from school. Then colour it in. You probably remember this technique from nursery, or from when it was raining and we didn't have Xboxes.

You probably remember this too, eh? Here's a lightly traced image of the opening titles of TV's Rainbow. And some Zippy and George cakepops.

Start with dark colours first, wait for them to dry (this doesn’t take long) then add lighter colours and finer detail. It’s a useful way of getting logos, other languages, cartoons and patterns onto a cake.

The other thing I love about painting with cocoa butter is that it goes nicely on chocolate and doesn’t smudge. It’s what I use to decorate and add detail to cakepops.

I’d recommend normal watercolour paintbrushes, some of which need to be very fine for detail. While you’re painting, keep wiping your paintbrushes with paper towel to keep them from clogging up and once you’re finished, wash them in hot water and washing up liquid to get all the cocoa butter off. Have fun!