Gloverly Cupcakes

 I’ve made a few cakes for one of our friends, Martin, but this is probably my favourite. When I asked what cake he wanted, Jen, his wife, said he loves Marvel Comics and the Hulk is his favourite. Other than that I had free reign to chose what to make. These are my favourite kind of cakes. After a search on Pinterest I found a few ideas I liked and decided to merge them all into one cake. I should have been more organised and made the decorations, or baked the cake, the night before but for some reason I didn’t. I somehow got it all done but only just! I enjoyed making this cake for two reasons – firstly I got to do some painting again, and secondly because I did some Rice Krispie cake sculpting which I’ve never done before. I made the words out of sugar florist paste. I cut the shapes out using scissors and then used a black food colouring pen to mark all the outlines. I then used petal dust, mixed with vodka, to paint the red, yellow and blue sections. I then left them to dry/harden while I made the actual cake. For the hand, I melted some marshmallows (I think it was about 100g) with a teaspoon of butter. Once they’d melted and turned into a sticky mess I stirred in enough cocoa pops so they just stuck together – it’s probably better to follow an actual recipe but I was just using up leftovers so made as much as I could. I then lined a tall pot with clingfilm and filled with the Rice Krispie cake mix and left it to set – I put it in the freezer to speed up the process. When it was set I lifted it out of the pot and peeled off the cling film. I then started carving it into a ‘clenched fist’. Before I could cover it in green icing, I spread on a thin layer of buttercream to fill in holes to give a smoother finish. The cake itself was just a Victoria sponge cake, which I covered with pale blue icing. I cut out lots of yellow circles in 3 different sizes to decorate the edge of the cake, and a long strip of yellow icing to go round the bottom and cover up the join of the cake to the board. I used the left over blue icing to cut out some triangles and placed them around the fist to make it look like it was punching through the cake.

Finally, I found some bomb candles that had been sat in the cupboard for years. Perfect, I thought! But when they got lit they let off black bits, crackled and re-lit – I probably should have checked the packet beforehand to check that they wouldn’t actually explode!