Easy Cake Decorating Ideas: Ladybird Cake

One of the first baking books I ever got was called Tule mukaan (Come along!). Recently, as I was going through it I saw that I had marked some of the recipes with a mysterious "B" - and I suddenly remembered that it stood for Birthday - things I wanted to serve at my birthday party. (Which I never did - my Mom would always bake her traditional cream cake - not bad, either!)

Among the recipes marked with "B", there was this ladybird cake. Back in those days, there wasn't coloured marzipan available, so the recipe tells you how to colour marzipan with red food colour, only available at the pharmacy back then. Maybe that's one of the reasons I never actually baked the cake myself...

Now the same cake was the first thing my kids wanted to try out from that book. They don't like marzipan, so we opted for red sugar mass - but I'd definitely use marzipan if I was only baking for myself. The cake tasted surprisingly good: fresh and tasty. Too often, this kind of cakes are just too sweet to my taste, but not this one! As far as I know, ladybirds don't have tails, but we had to add one more lolly so that all the three kids would have a lolly of their own.

For one cake you need:

• 4 eggs


• 100ml sugar


• 150ml all-purpose flour ( I used 1/3 whole-grain)


• 1 tsp baking powder

 

For the filling:

• 100ml heavy cream


• 100ml apple sauce (not too sweet)


• 1tsp vanilla sugar

 

For the topping:

• 100ml apple sauce


• one package of red sugar mass (I didn't take the reference of how many grams that was...)


• 2 liquorice bars, cut in 1cm pieces


• 2 lollipops (we had to use 3 - see above)

 

• Plus about 150ml milk for the moistening of the cake

This is how to do it:

Preheat the oven to 175C. Beat the eggs and sugar in a baking bowl and add sifted flour in which you've added the baking powder. Stir gently with a wooden spoon until the flour is well combined with the rest. Pour the batter in a round cake form and bake until golden brown, or some 15 minutes.

In the meantime, beat the cream until soft peaks form. Add vanilla sugar and the apple puree into the cream.

When the cake is well baked, remove it from the oven and let cool, then remove from the form and cut horizontally into two pieces either using a sharp knife or a string.

Place the bottom half on a serving plate. Moisten with about 75ml milk. Spread the cream-apple-filling on the bottom half, then place the upper half on top and moisten with the rest of the milk. Spread the 100ml apple puree on top.

Roll the sugar mass (or marzipan) between two layers of cling film into a disc just a bit bigger than the cake's diameter. Place the disc carefully on top of the cake and fold to cover the sides as well. Decorate your ladybird with the liquorice bar pieces (the dots) and lollies (the antennas).

I bet the cake gets even better if you let in stand in the fridge overnight. We had to eat it right away, though, so I can't tell for sure...!

P.S. In the original recipe, the middle part of the cake was cut out to make the ladybird oval instead of round. We didn't do that - we preferred to have a bigger cake ;)