Never Try, Never Fail.....

....never learn anything new! I have flicked past this cake, in this cookbook* so many times, searching for birthday cake inspiration. Each time I see it, I think to myself what a fantastic cake that would be, but it would never, ever, in a million years work. I have even made the cake itself, but decorated it differently, because I didn't want to risk making a big mess of my cake.



On the weekend, Maxx celebrated his birthday, and at the last minute, I decided I was going to have a go at making THAT cake. I must admit, I was a little afraid, ok, VERY afraid, when it came time to attach the chocolate collar around the cake, but it worked. The result wasn't perfect, there were wrinkles, some paper tearing and the white spots are a bit blurred, but I still felt like the cake was a spectacular success. I was after all, expecting a spectacular MESS!



I have learnt a few things when making this cake. I took a short-cut when making the dots. Since I already had "dots", I decided not to melt white chocolate to make spots for the cake and just placed them on the paper. This meant the dots were bigger, but I was ok with that. I now realise, that if I had melted the dots, probably they wouldn't have been blurred from the dark chocolate bleeding underneath. The other thing I learned was that it is ok to sometimes take a risk.



I felt that the kids probably wouldn't enjoy the cocoa dusted over the top, so opted for some pink sprinkles instead. I now have lots of ideas for different ways I can use the things I learnt making this cake. For some reason, when taking photos of cakes, there is almost always a hand appearing in at least one photo. Does this happen to you?

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