Pinata Birthday Cake

My little princess celebrated her 4th Birthday on the 17th! She likes Dora the Explorer but she wasn't sure what cake she wanted. I had practically decided on decorating a cake with Dora when The Lovely Wife reminded me of the Pinata Cake Idea that I had for my son's birthday last year. Since I made him a Pirate Cake instead of using the Pinata Cake idea last year, I decided that I would incorporate the Pinata idea into a Dora the Explorer theme for Sarah's cake!

This cake took a bit of planning. What I envisaged was a dome of chocolate that would act as a mountain. The dome would be filled with candies and chocolates. This would be placed in the centre of the cake and the lower half iced in green - as grass; and the top half iced in blue with white speckles - as the sky with clouds. I would then place a Dora toy on the cake as if Dora was really exploring!!

The Dora toy took a bit of finding. Sarah had a small Dora set but that was in a Cowgirl theme that didnt quite fit in with the overall scheme of things. After much searching, I finally found a Dora and Diego toy set - which was fortunate as Sarah likes Diego too! So with my props ready, I was now prepared to make the cake.

What I did first was to make the chocolate dome. This took a few tries as initially I just swirled melted chocolate into a steel mixing bowl. Problem was that the chocolate was too thin to unmould from the bowl. I tried to make it thicker with multiple coats but it just wouldn't unmould. So... I lined the bowl with Aluminium Foil, then swirled melted chocolate into it over and over and over again till I got a nice thick shell. While I was busy swirling, I was trying to figure out how to keep the goodies in and thought that I had best make a base for the dome. This was easily achieved by tracing the base of the bowl on to greaseproof paper and then spreading melted chocolate on the paper to harden. I then placed the dome and the base into the freezer to harden nicely.

With the dome all prepared, I then baked the cake and iced it as I had planned - green for the grass and blue with white for the sky. I left a spot in the middle of the cake bare as I knew that Chocolate dome would sit there.

When the dome was nice and hard, I peeled off the Aluminium foil and noticed that it gave a nice rippled effect. It was now time to fill the shell and I filled it with miniature chocolates, Smarties, Candies and chocolate coins. I then covered the dome with the base and piped in melted chocolate to seal the dome and cover any empty spaces between the base and the dome. The Pinata was now complete and I put it back in the freezer just to make sure it didnt soften in the hot weather.

Just before taking the cake out for the Birthday Girl, I arranged the dome on the cake together with the Dora and Diego toys. I also arranged some plastic trees around the dome/mountain.



Sarah was thrilled with the cake!



We sang Happy Birthday before she broke the Pinata Cake with a toy hammer from her brother's old Play-Doh set.


The 'mountain' was fairly hard to crack but after a few good whacks, Sarah managed to make the mountain come tumbling down!


All her cousins- and even her uncle (my eldest brother!) started grabbing for the 'treasure' that tumbled out of the Pinata.



After tidying up the 'treasure' we put some candles on the cake and sang Happy Birthday again!




This cake was a lot of fun to make and even better was seeing how much fun my little princess had with it! There was also a whole heap of other goodies like Chocolate Brownies, Currypuffs, Spicy Sausages and even an original recipe that I tried out just for her birthday - a special, special chocolate dessert - but I'll keep all that for future posts.

Happy Birthday Sarah!