Help me bake a blue cake

[PersisFord]

I need HELP PLEASE!!

I have promised to bake a Percy Jackson cake for my daughter’s birthday. She’s had a rotten year (haven’t they all?) and I would like to give it a good try. She and I looked at Pinterest and she found a cake she wanted - it has layers of blue fondant round the outside to make waves (fine) but it also has 2 problems:

The cake itself is blue! She is quite fussy about taste and I don’t know which food colouring would be best to use?

It has a gold trident sticking out the top! This apparently must be edible too.

I am a competent family baker (as in I make cakes and bread that taste nice) but I have no creative skills, and have never made this kind of fancy cake. I’d really appreciate some advice on colouring the cake and making the trident. Should I make it out of fondant and skewers and just paint it gold? Is there an option that would taste better? What flavour should the cake be?

Thanks for any help - this is significantly outside my comfort zone (traybakes)!

Sorry, the trident is silver!

I’m getting flustered. She’s looking at me with her beautiful, accusing eyes. I have just suggested again that we buy a blue cake....this was unpopular

Blue food colouring gel would work best, no taste off it, but with the yellow of butter there's always a chance it will have a green tinge.

Trident made out of white chocolate and sprayed/dusted gold?

Buy a good gel food colouring, it won't change the flavour of the cake at all. I would print out a picture of the trident and use it as a template, cut it out of fondant them paint it with edible silver paint. So long as you do it a day or so I'm advance it will dry out and firm up.

Alternatively, you could get a trident printed on rice paper - loads of sellers on Amazon and Ebay.

Break it down into components instead of looking at the whole thing, and there are 1000s of fondant tutorials online

I think you can buy white butter to stop the yellow butter changing cake colour. Deffo available in states, but sure here too. Sugarflair gel colours are good. Use more rather than less. The colours don’t really affect flavour b out some vanill in to mask as well? And yes, buy rice paper print of tricent. Stick onto fondant shaped like trident. Spray with silver food spray too.

Oh BRILLIANT! Thank you!

So just a vanilla sponge with the blue colouring? I don’t need to do any different cake recipe?

I’ll look for white butter, I hadn’t thought of that....

Rice paper is also GENIUS.

No need for a different recipe at all, the colouring is just colouring, not flavour.

I use sugarflair colour paste there are loads of shades of blue for example

www.cake-stuff.com/item/12436/Sugarflair/ARCTIC-BLUE-Satin-paste-gel-icing-food-colouring-25g.html

You could use pale butter like lurpak for a whiter cake base, but I think I’ve been ok with usual cheap marge, beat the hell out if the butter sugar stage so it goes as pale as possible. If you are not sure on how much colour, use more (or buy a ‘darker’ blue!) also suggest a test batch of 6 cup cakes or something to make sure you are ok with the colour and taste. My lot don’t notice any difference in flavour and we make lots of colours! (Baking with kids style chaos not tidy professional looking cakes )

No idea on the trident, so what everyone else said…

Good luck!

Oh and we can get white fat over in uk - trex - I’ve used it in pastry. No idea if a trex cake is nice though!

Beat your butter until it's white before you make the cake. Use egg whites only. Use a good quality gel colour.

To make the trident, add Tylose powder to fondant, and make it a while in advance so it's got time to dry out.
If you pop it in an airtight container with some of the little sachets you get in handbags etc - silica, it will help dry it out faster.

Sainsbury’s (and probably mother supermarkets) sell dr oetkar food gel. It’s a really thick food colouring and extremely vivid

I’m sure there are better ones online but for easy to get to stuff, that’s a good go to

You can also get edible silver and gold spray in the supermarket which is what I use.

This is all exciting!!! Daughter now wants to help make it so that will take the edge of it needing to be perfect as I will blame her!

Thank you xxx

I had a trial run of the blue cake at the weekend and it was BRILLIANTLY blue. Sugar flair colour and a slug of vanilla paste in my trusty Delia all in one sponge. It’s been so much fun for my daughter and I to do together as well!

Thank you all so much x

And as a bonus you get to eat the stunt double blue cake as well as the real deal in due course

Great work op!