I baked and decorated a pinata cake

A Pinata Cake

For my son’s 5th birthday I created a pinata cake, the inside was filled with various sweets, with the outside decorated with a pinata theme topped with a model pinata character.

This was pushing out of my comfort zone quite a bit, but it’s very hard to mess up, bright colours and a rough and ready feel hide mistakes to the casual eye. In reality it was a surprisingly simple process that was received very well.

How I Made…

2 cakes stacked on top of each other, whatever recipe you prefer. I used a very moist chocolate cake, which was a bit of a mistake, as the moisture caused the skittles to run and bind the sweets inside into a sticky mess.

I cut out a 5cm (2inch) hole from the middle using a bread knife and filled it with candy (Skittles and Dolly mixture). From the hole in the middle I kept a 2cm (1 inch) thick circle of cake I put back on the top.

I then rolled out the fondant very thin and sliced it into 2cm strips (1 inch), every 2 fingers spacing I placed a split that went ¾ of the way through then wrapped the fondant around the cake and trimmed off the excess. Where it wasn’t sticking, using a little water on the fondant to make it sticky. Starting at the bottom and rising up the cake. For the top of the cake I simply rolled out a circle of fondant and placed slits around, making smaller and smaller circles as I went.

The model on top was maybe the most time consuming and most rewarding part, it took about an hour at the dining room table, while watching netflix to get it right. I created the shape from a solid block of fondant, and then very slowly repeated the process applied to the cake for the model on a lot smaller scale. The eyes were a candy bought from Tesco, however could be recreated with fondant fairly easily.

Changes for next time…

Quite a few things were learnt from this that I really need to keep in mind for the future;

  • I used flour on my fingers to reduce the fondant sticking to them, but this was hard to remove from the fondant after the fact and stands out against the bright colours.
  • The sweets inside really need to be thought out, a lot of thought! Skittles became sticky and ran, this binded the dolly mixture together. Mini Marshmallows, mini jelly tots and possibly jelly beans… maybe. As well as a lot less moist of a cake.
  • Making the character out of solid fondant made the process a lot easier, however eating solid fondant is not fun, and the kids really wanted to eat it. Next time trying a cake centre from the off cuts, maybe cake pop mixture as well as perhaps some modelling chocolate.