Coolest Tent Cake 11
by Holly M.
(Albany, CA)
Tent Cake
My sister asked for a camping birthday celebration, so I decided to make her a tent cake, in the shape of our traditional rectangular cabin-style tent.
This cake was created based on a "doll house" pattern from the old Bakers coconut cut-up cake books. It's two square layers. One is cut corner to corner, both ways, to make four triangles which, set upright next to each other, form the roof.
The other cake gets a strip cut off so that the base matches the width of the four triangles, and the extra strip is split horizontally and the pieces laid on top of the base for some added height on the walls.
I used lemon cake with chocolate ganache filling in between all the pieces (the thick ganache really helped glue it all together!) and lemon buttercream frosting. I frosted the whole thing green and then used decorating tips to detail the door, windows, tent poles, and loops over the poles using black, grey and lighter green icing.
For the campfire, I used "chocolate rocks" candies to make the ring, cinnamon red-hots partly coated in black frosting for coals (they don't show in the photo but looked awesome), some grey frosting for ashes, and chocolate-covered cookie sticks cut into various sizes for logs. The flames are crushed hard candies (red, orange and yellow), melted on a cookie sheet in the oven, and broken into jagged shapes when cool. (I assembled the campfire on top of a graham cracker so that it would be a bit more portable -- it didn't fit right inside the cover of my cake carrier, and this cake actually went on a camping trip!)
