This year, when I asked my son what kind of birthday cake he would like, he quickly said that he wanted a cannon cake. I immediately thought, “How am I going to pull this one off?”! Looking on the web for some help on designing a cannon cake I found very little to help me. I was going to be on my own with this one. I decided that I would start with a chocolate cake roll for the barrel and two large cookies for the wheels.
I started out with making my normal chocolate birthday cake recipe. I then poured part of the mixture on a greased, parchment paper lined 10×15″ jelly roll pan. I baked the cake for about fifteen minutes or until it was cooked through. I had leftover batter so I ended up pouring that into a loaf pan and cooking that. While the cake cooled for ten minutes, I dusted a kitchen towel with lots of powdered sugar.
Then I carefully flipped the cake onto the prepared towel. Slowly, I rolled the cake, starting on the short side. I then let the cake cool for about thirty minutes before unrolling it and adding the filling.
As soon as I unrolled the cake I knew that I had problems. The cake began to have large cracks in it. I decided that maybe my filling would hold the whole thing together so I proceeded to apply the filling to the cake. The filling was homemade marshmallow fluff. You can find the recipe here.
After the cake was covered, I began to roll it back up. Needless to say, the filling didn’t hold the cake together and as soon as I had finished rolling it, the cracks just split right apart and everything started to ooze.
My husband took one look at me and said “Janelle, don’t cry. We can fix this.” I had to cook all the food for the birthday party and now my cannon barrel was completely ruined.
Trying to keep myself together, I ended up taking this *blob* of a cake and placing it in the middle, on top of an inverted cookie sheet that was lined with foil. I leveled off the top of the loaf cake and then cut it into two perfect squares to make the forts. The left over pieces from the loaf were made into small slices to fill in the gaps on the cake.
I made a very small batch of buttercream frosting and used that to lightly coat the top of the cake as well as the top and sides of the forts. I stuck small pretzel sticks to the sides of the forts.
For the grass on the cake, I took approximately one cup of dried coconut and added to it a mixure of 1 tablespoon of water mixed with green food coloring. I placed a lid on my container and shook everything together. That made the green coconut grass. I had to make two batches to cover enough of the cake.
For the final touches, I used Sweet Tarts for the cannon balls, LEGO cannons and Stratego games pieces for the soldiers. My husband and I made our own flags by coloring pieces of paper and adding them to long toothpicks.
The cake didn’t turn out how I had orginally planned, but my son loved it and I had fun using my creativity to make it.
I’m impressed with how well you improvised and came up with an impressive cake! Happy birthday, John!