Baymax Cake & Oreos

Big boy Ethan is already turning 3 years old! Since he was having three celebrations this year and needed three cakes (one with family and friends, one at church and one at school), his mummy wanted to keep things simple and go for cakes decorated with edible icing sheets and a Baymax action figure. 

Big Hero 6 cake

It would be my first time working with icing sheets, so I made sure to read up on them. The main points would be that they're straightforward to work with and are easy to cut but they dry out quickly once they are removed from their plastic packaging and they shouldn't be kept in the fridge due to condensation (like fondant). Anyway, Ethan's mummy designed all the edible images and printed them using an online edible image printing service.

fresh-cut strawberries in the filling

red and white strawberry & vanilla cake layers

Sticking with "Baymax colours" of red and white, the cake is 2 layers of strawberry cake dyed red, with white layer of vanilla butter cake sandwiched in between. The filling is strawberry Swiss meringue buttercream and chopped up fresh strawberries. Yum. It's the same flavour as this welcome cake that I made for Ethan's baby brother, Connor. 

spot the fondant Megabot

She also gave me the green light to "spruce up" Ethan's cakes, but I only had the sides to work with! So on one "side", I added Ethan's name in Big Hero 6 font and a number 3, hand-cut from fondant. I also made a cute little Megabot.  

Baymax made out of m&m's

For the other "side" of the cake, I put together Baymax's head with his red armour on, all made out of red m&m's and m&m's minis! How many packs of m&m's did I have to buy to get this many red m&m's, you might ask? Well, actually, just one. Luckily I still have a bucket of red & green Christmas m&m's from our family trip to Melbourne so it was easy to pick out just the red ones. Yellow mini m&m's were used to border the bottom of the cake.

I did pre-arrange the m&m's on paper before sticking them on the cake, but it didn't come out as round as I would have liked. Oh, an important thing to note is that since the cake is covered in buttercream, it is way easier to stick the m&m's on while the cake is still cold and the buttercream is nice and solid. Once the buttercream warms up and gets squishy, sticking m&m's on may get to be a very messy job. 

edible icing sheet image

I trimmed the edible image and then lay it right down on top of the buttercream cake, pressing lightly with a fondant smoother to get it to stick. I wish I had done a better job of smoothening out the buttercream underneath because the little lumps and bumps were visible on the icing sheet.

Happy 3rd Birthday, Ethan!

So the edible image printing company did advise not to put the cake in the fridge once the edible icing sheet had been applied to it as condensation might form once the cake is removed from the fridge, causing the colours to bleed. However, we did end up putting the cake in the fridge at the restaurant since Ethan's celebration was in an al fresco restaurant and we didn't want to risk the buttercream melting in 35C+ humid weather. Luckily, the cake was completely fine even after taking it out of the fridge and outdoors, with no visible condensation or bleeding on the edible image. 

Chocolate-covered Oreos in super cool Big Hero 6 goodie bags

mmm red and white Baymax Oreo

To go in the super cool Big Hero 6 drawstring backpack giveaway bags that Ethan's mummy put together, I got to make red and white chocolate covered Oreos. The red ones have "Less Sweet" Oreos in them, and the white ones have Chocolate Oreos in them. They are best eaten at room temperature and not out of the fridge because the chocolate gets hard in the fridge (though I couldn't resist taking a bite out of one, straight from the fridge). 

Big Hero 6 cake

Once the cake started warming up and the buttercream started to get soft, the toy Baymax action figure on top started to slowly sink in and lose balance! It was a zoo trying to get all the kids gathered around the cake, since there was both an indoor and an outdoor play area to distract them! Anyway, we managed to get almost everyone to come and sing the birthday song for Ethan, and then enjoy some cake before dinner. Yummmm... dessert before dinner. 

hand-cut letters, Big Hero font-style

My kids had two slices each before running back to the playground without even wiping their mouths clean! Sheesh. Happy 3rd Birthday, big boy Ethan! Thanks for having us at your birthday party!

mmm red and white strawberry & vanilla cake