50th Birthday Cake (Take 2)

Yesterday another coworker of mine turned 50. To celebrate, I was asked to make another cake. Since he is a chemist, I thought a "beaker" type cake would be appropriate. And as you can see in the image, the beaker is filled up to 50.

For simplicity (and lack of time) I used a box cake mix. And as usual, I added pudding powder to the batter. The cake itself is a vanilla cake. To make the beaker shape, I used an oval cake pan and made 4 cakes. I cut the cakes in half along the longest side of the oval and stacked them against each other on the board. To help hold them together, I put a chocolate mousse between the layers. The mousse was a "just-add-milk" mix but to make it thicker, I made it with heavy cream.

The icing was my typical butter cream. If you want more info on that, check out my previous cake posts.

The green "liquid" in the beaker is decorating sugar that I poured over the icing. It set in place once the cake was put into the fridge and the icing set.

To make the numbers and the information box on the beaker, I used melted chocolate. So that I would get everything even and written out nicely, I first got a piece of wax paper and cut it to the size of the cake. I then drew the numbers and the box on the wax paper. I flipped the wax paper over and wrote out everything in chocolate backwards (well, I traced over what I wrote on the other side). Once it was starting to set, I laid the wax paper over the cake (chocolate side down) and pressed the writing into the icing. Then when the paper was peeled off, the chocolate writing remained. The lines for the beaker were done by hand on the cake, so they are not as straight as they should be.

To finish it off and cover up the edges, I put some Mike & Ike candies around the cake. I thought they kind of looked like molecules or something. Actually, they remind me of the pills from Dr. Mario but that's not important here.

As usual, the cake went over well (even if it was confused for a football field for a little while). Pretty much everyone cleaned their plates off and birthday guy took the rest home to his family. He said this morning that they really liked it.