Introducing the Chocamak!

My next big project was a very special cake that was designed for L's boyfriend. The story behind this is that L's boyfriend was about to take his PhD viva, and L wanted to make him a cake to present him with immediately after he completed his viva, either as a "Yay! Well done! Congratulations!", or a "Commiserations, sorry dude, never mind, PhDs are highly overrated".

L decided a long time ago that she really wanted to have a go at making a Tokamak cake, which would be known as the Chocamak. Therefore we thought this would be the perfect cake to make for her boyfriend. So I looked around on the Internet, and I found this picture of a Tokamak which we thought would do as the basis for our cake design.

A Tokamak (apparently).

Before we could even think about the outside decoration we had decided that we wanted to attempt to replicate the plasma usually found inside of a Tokamak. Therefore I turned to yet another recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days book, and I decided to use and adapt the marbled cupcakes recipe that they had written. Basically what I did was I doubled up on the quantity of the ingredients in the recipe. I decided to use the ring cake tin that I had previously used for the Guinness and chocolate cake, and I basically made two ring cakes and then the placed one on top of the other, sealing them together with a simple buttercream icing. As with the Guinness and chocolate cake, some of the cake was actually stuck to the cake tin, and therefore L and I made use of some apricot jam in order to stick some bits of the cake back together.

Once the cake cooled, it was time to ice it. Therefore, we covered the cake in apricot jam and then we delicately placed some ready rolled white fondant icing over it, and then moulded the icing around the cake. Extra bits of icing were stuck on using a combination of the apricot jam, and some more of the buttercream icing. Once the fondant icing was in place, we sprayed it with them edible silver glitter spray. For the coils, the horizontal lines were done with some red icing, from a preprepared tube of icing, and then the vertical coils were actually created using strawberry laces. The laces were glued on using buttercream icing.

Behold the Chocamak!

Chocamak Awesomeness (best tokamak cake ever).

I'm very pleased to say that L's boyfriend passed his viva with minor corrections, and I am even more pleased to say that the cake went down extremely well. As you can see from the photo below, the marbling effect worked very well, and the cake proved to be very popular with a lot of the physicists. I'm definitely calling this one a success.

Woohoo! Plasma!

Beckie.