ReCPY: Broken Leg Cake for a Gay Footballer

Before I start this week's post, let's congratulate Kayoko and the crew for revamping the Umamimart site to a whole new level. Orange is my favorite color, so this is cool, and soon enough, we will be FAMOUS bloggers!! Hooray.

As you've seen from my past posts, I've made cakes for basically all of my friends birthdays in recent years, and since I made pink Barbie cake for my friend Derek, there's a lot of pressure now. I have to top each birthday cake with something better, crazier, and funny as hell.

My friend Mike's birthday was coming up, and I decided to make a crazy cake for him. What shape or flavor should I create? Fun shape, fun flavor, what could I do?  After talking with friends, we came to conclude that it had to relate to his recent injury. He broke his foot pretty badly when he was playing gay football. Don't ask me about the difference between regular football and gay football, but it has something to do with less protection? Flags or something? Since I don't follow sports whatsoever, I have no idea when he talks about his "gay football league".

Anyhow, he is recovering pretty well, and ready to get back to playing, which is good.

So what is broken leg cake? It could be a X-ray photo of broken leg on top of  square cake, but that's kinda too realistic and gross, so I googled around "broken leg cake", and someone has made it look like a leg in a cast. Great inspiration.

Knowing that his favorite cake was chocolate cake, I found an interesting German chocolate cake recipe that uses a lot of coffee.

INGREDIENTS

4 cups sugar
2 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 cup cocoa
3 tsp baking powder
3 tsp baking soda
2 tsp salt
4 eggs
2 cups buttermilk
1 cup butter, melted
2 tbsp vanilla extract
2 cups hot coffee

METHOD

Preheat oven to 350˚F degrees.

I used two cookie sheets to make this, just like my wedding cake. My idea was to make a jelly roll.

In the large bowl of a standing mixer, stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Add eggs, buttermilk, melted butter and vanilla extract; beat 2 minutes on medium speed.

Stir in the hot coffee.

The batter is soooo runny, and I may use 1 cup of coffee next time. Pour batter in evenly, spread it out and bake for about 15 minutes or so.

The cake is INCREDIBLY soft. Maybe buttermilk, maybe coffee, but whatever it was, this was almost too soft to make shapes. I was suddenly reminded by the horror story from my wedding cake endeavor, and realized rolling them wasn't an option.

Me being pretty good at improvising, I decided to just layer them. By the way, above recipe makes way too much cake. You basically need half this to create the leg.

Meanwhile, I made raspberry jam-esque stuff using frozen raspberry, sugar and corn starch, to make the filling look like blood. How clever!



Not a great picture, but you can see how much it broke when cutting, assembling this soft cake.



Blood seeping out of flesh, how realistic this is! I know I was covering up with cream, so I let go of my perfectionism.

By the way, where the foot is, I made a large cake ball (mushing cake, mixing with a bit of raspberry jam as binder, and made a large flat ball shape, to fit how a foot may look like in this shape, and stuck it to the bottom of the "leg" part. I also made sure to use bunch of long wooden stick to secure its placement. You do not want "broken" broken leg cake, right?

I made cream cheese and white chocolate frosting, and first crumb-coated it.

Then I needed toes. Thank you marzipan. The color is pretty close to skin, and it was very easy to deal with. I just rolled them, looking at my own toes (this is important) and shape it like one, then press where the nail is with knife, toothpick, etc., to make a dent for nails.



This gives you a great idea for this year's Halloween cake, don't you think? I thought, after all, this was for a gay footballer, I need to flame this up.



It gets grosser! I painted the nails with red food coloring, and added a base to attach to cake.

Attach it to the top of the cake ball, and start piping the white cream, so that it looks like cast.



Then with the widest flat tip (898), carefully piped it, and also made sure each layer overlaps to give it a good "wrapped leg" effect.

Since the party was a block from my apartment, I carefully hand-carried it. While I was walking over, people were like, "WTF is that?!!" Then realized it was broken leg cake.

This was a big hit at the party. Sort of gross to say, but marzipan toes tasted quite good as well.

Happy Birthday Mike!