Chocolate-E

A couple weekends ago we had a joint birthday party for three family members and I ended up making two of the cakes. Mainly I just thought it would be a fun chance for me to get to play around with cake decorating! Little Emily just turned 1 and since there were going to be other cakes there as well, I decided to just make a tiny one for her. Unfortunately I didn't get that many good pictures of the cake as a whole (and my step by step pictures were mostly taken on my iPhone) but here is a look at her cake:

I am really quite horrible at writing on cakes, so I didn't want to attempt anything that would guarantee the cake looking bad. I had the idea to make a big chocolate E for the top and I happened to have some white melting chocolates (although I'm sad to say that next to the white flowers it looks yellow!). I'm sure there's a name for the technique I used (surely I'm not the first person to do it!) but I'm not sure what it is. Here is how I made my cake topper:

First I printed out the letter I wanted to use (I realize this is not the letter E I ended up with). I wasn't sure exactly what size I wanted so I printed out a few. Keep in mind the letters need to be printed out backwards!

Next I melted down the chocolate and - ideally - would have loaded it into an icing bag with a small writing tip. I, however, could not find a single icing bag in the house. I considered using a plastic sandwich bag but  last time we bought them Aaron accidentally got the Ziplock Evolve bags. All things considered, they are a nice buy because they are made using a lot less plastic... however, they didn't seem strong enough for my purposes. The best I could find was wax paper. Looking back I probably could have gone online to find a good way to make your own icing bags... but I was not patient enough for that! I just fudged it and it wasn't great... but it seemed to work pretty much ok. Here's a look at my wonky icing bag:

Nice, right! Well it did the job. I put a piece of wax paper over the letters and carefully filled in the E. The chocolate melts harden fairly quickly and by the time I went to smooth out some of the lines, they were already hard. In hindsight I should have smoothed the edges as I was working, but so much for that.

Originally I wanted to do a fancy cursive E, but when I was looking through fonts on the computer, they all seemed so thin. I didn't think it would hold together... but I had lots of leftover chocolate so I thought I'd give it a try. I may have also doodled a bit....

When they are fully hardened, flip them over and carefully peel back the wax paper. What you should have is a nice smooth top and the bumpy part on the bottom won't show! They both ended up coming out great, so I went with the cursive E. I will say though, it was much more fragile than the other one and ended up breaking in 3 separate places... luckily I had plenty of chocolate to glue it together!

So what do you think? Now that I've done it once and know better how the chocolate hardens, I think they would come out much better. I'll have to find an excuse to try this out again soon!