Lego cake, three ways

The highlight of my trip to Brisbane was Joel's first birthday party. Penne decided to cook him a Lego Cake from one of Donna Hay's magazines. In typical Richard fashion, rather than helping Penne I muscled in and more of less took over the cake making.

The cake recipe itself was a pretty simple sponge cake. It was slightly denser than your average sponge, but then it probably needs to be for the various shaping, cutting and decorating feats that you have to put the cake through. (Donna Hay suggests the same recipe for multiple cakes, several of which are more 'structural' than the Lego cake.)

Once we'd baked the cake it was time to make the cream cheese icing and then to decorate it. I haven't played with food colouring since I was a kid. We had to add an unnerving amount of red food colouring to turn the creme cheese red rather than pink. 'E' numbers anyone?

The icing of the cake turned out a lot better than I thought it would do. Without a palate knife I was improvising with a bread knife. Admittedly it wasn't perfectly smooth or square. But it looks pretty good don't you think?

A copy of the recipe can be found here.

I'm not sure what Donna Hay was thinking when she suggested making nearly 1kg of icing. We had at least three quarters of it left after making the cake!

I was determined not to let it go to waste. After a bit of head scratching I decided to make a cheesecake. I added an egg, tablespoon of flour and some grated lemon zest to each bowl of icing and gave it a good mix.

Unsure of how to approach the colour mixing I remembered Suze's rainbow cake and decided to follow the same method.

I wouldn't claim it was the best cheesecake ever, but for some quick improvisation I think we had another success!

The leftover icing was on epic scale. However, there were quite a few offcuts from shaping the cake too. Needing to make a desert to take to a friends house a few days later, I decided on my first ever trifle. The trifle didn't look like the most pretty desert ever, but comfort food never does.

One cake recipe turned into three desserts. Win!