Homemade Tiger Cake

My son wanted a tiger cake for his birthday, and I am not very good at frosting cakes, so this is my easy version of a tiger cake.

1. Use an cake recipe you like. I bought a marble cake mike and colored the white part of the cake with some orange food coloring to continue the tiger theme inside the cake.

2. Bake your cake in two round cake pans according to the instructions in your recipe.

3. When the cakes have cooled, slice off the rounded tops of the cakes so you have a flat surface to work with.

4. Color some white icing with orange food coloring.

5. Assemble the two cakes, one on top of the other with a layer of frosting between.

6. Frost the entire outside of the cake with orange icing. You can do a crumb coat (a thin layer of icing under the main layer of icing) in order to prevent crumbs from mixing into your icing. Make sure the top layer of icing is as smooth as possible. It doesn’t have to be perfect, just do your best.

7. Place a piece of waxed paper on your counter

8. Measure the height of the sides of your cake.

9. Draw parallel lines on the waxed paper indicating the height of your cake, then flip the waxed paper over (so you can still see the lines, but they are on the under-side of the waxed paper.

10. Melt some chocolate candy wafers (the kind you use in chocolate molds).

11. Put a small amount of the melted chocolate on a teaspoon, and drizzle the chocolate onto the waxed paper, drawing the brown tiger stripes with the chocolate. You will need to make several individual stripes, and you may need to melt more chocolate as you go, depending on how quickly you work. This is not as difficult as it may sound. Outline the stripes first with melted chocolate, then fill in the outlined area with more chocolate. Don’t worry about making perfect lines; they should be free-form. Use the lines you drew on the waxed paper as a guide for the length of the stripes make some stripes slightly shorter and some slightly longer. Vary the shape of your stripes. Make some that end in a single point, and other that have a couple of points.

12. Once you have created enough chocolate stripes to cover your cake (plus a few extra to account for mistakes), let the chocolate cool.

13. Remove the chocolate stripes from the waxed paper, and assemble them on the the cake. This is the step that requires a bit of patience and a good eye. Arrange the stripes on the cake so that they look fairy random and free-form. You don’t want all of the stripes to be the same length. You can cut your chocolate stripes in order to make the fit, just put the straight, cut edge of the chocolate at the bottom our outside edge of the cake.


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