Build-a-Bear part two

Before Christmas I tried to build my own bear. The results weren't as good as I'd hoped and so I tried again later. This time things went much more smoothly, mainly because I was slightly less ambitious.

The first bear didn't turn out because the fur texture is fiendishly difficult to do well. Since this cake is all about the presentation, I decided to go with an easier fur texture and used mocha icing instead of sugar fur.

My recipe for mocha icing is as follows

Ingredients

  • 3 cups icing sugar
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter
  • 2 Tbs. strong coffee
  • 1 Tbs cocoa powder

Directions

  • Cream butter
  • Add all ingredients and blend until creamy
  • Add more coffee/cocoa until the desired thickness and flavour is reached

This recipe makes a lot of icing but I find I use a lot when covering this bear. For one thing, there is a lot of surface area to cover. Also, if you make a mistake later on it helps to have spare icing to patch things up. Finally, there will be icing left over which can be added onto the cake pieces. This bear is quite big and the cake slices tend to not have much icing on them. It's nice to be able to add a bit of extra icing.

The standard recipe on the back of the box calls for vanilla buttercream icing to glue the cake halves together. I find that this works but it's better to use the same icing on the outside as on the inside, so that you don't have too many icing flavours on the go.

For decorating, I used some white icing for the inside of the bear's ears and some other details, and some chocolate chips melted with some butter for some of the other details. The bear turned out not bad, and all that icing goes well with the relatively dry bundt recipe.