Build-a-Bear part 3

I've posted before about my build-a-bear cake pan. I've used it a couple of times now and I think I can finally claim to have the hang of it. I've made the bear cake maybe half-a-dozen times and each time it has turned out more or less ok.  However, the last two times I upped the ante a bit by using fondant for decorating it. This gives the bear "clothes" and is a really good finishing touch to make the bear look special.

I googled around for other people's advice on using this cake pan and I was surprised at how many people couldn't get the bear to assemble properly. People claimed there wasn't enough batter in the recipe, or the cake fell apart, or other problems. I have to say that not once has the back-of-the-box recipe failed me in any way. It makes a cake that is strong enough to stand up, good-tasting, and the proper quantity for the bear pan.

That being said, I have a new challenge when making this cake. My son is allergic to milk and eggs, and thus we've had to vegan-ize some of our recipes. In some cases that's easy to do but in this recipe we have to replace 4 eggs. However with a bit of experimentation I came upon a winning formula. I replaced the milk with soy milk (plain, sweetened, unflavoured). I replaced the butter with half shortening, half margarine (this mixture worked well for me when making cookies). For the eggs, I replaced the eggs with 1/4 cup per egg of pureed pumpkin, and I tripled the baking powder. Since I was making a pumpkin cake I also added some spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice.

The resulting cake was better than any of the previous bear cakes I've ever made, and if I do say so myself, was better than almost any cake I've ever made. It was moist and rich, yet strong enough to stand in bear-shape.  I had a bit of minor tearing when the cake came out of the pan, but the head didn't fall off and I was able to fix up any glitches with a patch of icing.  Once iced there was no way to tell that it wasn't the same old dry cake underneath.

Since I also couldn't make buttercream icing I used my half shortening, half margarine substitution for the butter and added a touch of pumpkin and some spices. Then I iced the entire cake, even the parts which would end up covered in fondant.  Finally, I rolled,  cut and trimmed the fondant and dressed the bear up in its outfit.  Since I was making a white dress I used white fondant and didn't bother with any dyes (I did dye the buttercream icing brown).  Dyeing fondant is a major hassle (I spent more time dyeing the fondant when I made a Santa bear last Christmas than I did doing any other part of the decoration).  I used white icing to trim the edges of the dress.

The last touches of decor on the bear are the eyes, nose, and feet-pads. For these I simply melted some chocolate chips in margarine, stirred, put it into a plastic sandwich bag, cut the corner, and squeezed it out. This makeshift cake-decorating bag was enough to make these flat-ish elements. The resulting bear was cute enough that when I brought it to my friend's baby shower, people on the subway and street stopped to talk to me about it, and nobody at the shower wanted to actually cut the cake. So I call this one a success.

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.

Build-a-bear cake pan

I bought a Build-a-bear cake pan from Williams-Sonoma for Christmas. This was meant as a Christmas present for my wife, however because I do the baking it's really the CAKES that are the present, and thus we tried making one of these cakes over the weekend to give it a trial run before Christmas.

Things didn't start off well because the cake pan was defective. The pan's finish wasn't properly applied and had a big crack, and part of it was flaking off. I recommend that anyone planning to buy one of these carefully examine it in the store. The boxes can be opened without destroying them so the store staff shouldn't mind.

After exchanging the pan, I followed the recipe on the back of the box. The box comes with a recipe for a bundt cake that is quite easy to make. The cake tasted great, although you can use any recipe you want, as long as the cake is dense enough to stand up on its own. My only complaint is that the recipe is printed on the box, when it should be a paper insert instead. Now I have to transcribe it. I've noticed this defect with every Williams-Sonoma cake pan. I guess it saves on packaging, but please, these pans aren't cheap. At least give us a sheet of paper!

Assembling the 3-D bear isn't hard at all. After the cake has finished baking, you cool it for a few minutes in the pan, remove it from the pan, cool it some more, then put it back in the pan. This process takes a few hours in total. When the cake is fully cooled, you put it back in the pan so that you can cut off the extra that rises above the pan. Then you spread icing on half, and put the other half on top, then pop it into the fridge so that the icing can set. We had a slight problem: the cake didn't come cleanly out of the pan the second time, so one half of the bear was decapitated. Luckily we were able to repair it with some icing and skewers; in the end the damage wasn't noticeable.

Decorating the finished cake is the hard part. I had a lot of difficulty applying the glaze and the brown sugar which simulates the fur. The Williams-Sonoma website has a how-to video which shows a woman applying the "fur". I notice that her cake doesn't look as good as the one on the box (though it is far better looking than mine). In the end the fur was so difficult that I think my next cake will just use a glaze or icing fur. My "furry" bear appears to have some kind of odd patchy disease. Maybe next time I'll try to make some fondant to clothe the bear; at least then you don't need to put as much fur on.


Despite the bear's poor appearance, it was a lot of fun to make and delicious to eat. Hopefully in a couple weeks I'll have perfected my technique.

Edit:
The man from Williams-Sonoma eventually did mail me the Santa Template. Stay tuned; next Christmas I'll try it out. Also, I eventually did make a new bear. It turned out better.