Adventures in Caking: The Legend of Zelda

I'm pretty much an awesome wife.  When Husband said he didn't care what kind of cake I made him for his birthday, I originally planned on just making his favorite coffee-chocolate cake.  Then I thought I could put a little fondant Triforce on it (he's loved every Zelda game his entire life).  But if I was going to be making fondant anyway, I might as well do something a little more elaborate.  Then it turned into a whole, big design.  And finally, I decided to try out new recipes.

Dark chocolate-bacon cake.  With maple-bacon frosting.  And bacon fondant.

The cake itself was basically the same recipe as the coffee-chocolate cake, but with bits of bacon mixed in.  It's really good, but next time I'll mince the bacon (instead of just chopping it into small pieces), because I didn't really like the noticeable pieces of bacon in the cake.  They just get too chewy and weird in a cake.

But the frosting.  A-mazing.  For this, I did mince the bacon, because I knew I'd be putting fondant over it, and I didn't want it to make my cake all bumpy (or tear the fondant) with bacon pieces.  Personally, I could do without the bacon and just eat the most delicious frosting I've ever tasted in my life, but the saltiness of the bacon added a great flavor.  And since Husband wanted bacon, it was perfect.

For the fondant, I ordered some liquid bacon flavoring and just about 5 drops of it, along side regular vanilla extract.  It had a vague hint of bacon, but it was a sweet taste (since it's all marshmallows and sugar, anyway).  It was great by itself, but I couldn't really taste it on the cake (I'm also not a big fondant person - I love it for decorating, since I can do so much more with it, but I don't care if it's on the cake or not.  Fortunately, the recipe I use tends to blend in pretty seamlessly with the frosting flavors, so it's really not very noticeable at all.)

Then I miraculously stumbled across a tiny square fondant cutter that I didn't even know I had.  That probably saved me about 10 hours of work.  All the decorations are fondant (since I'm pretty terrible at piping, but after this cake, I feel like I'm going to need to learn - I think the lettering at the top would have been much better piped, if I were more capable), except the bushes, which are just leftover maple-bacon frosting.

Husband loved his cake.  Then he decided the only thing that would make it cooler would be if I made him a Zelda cake for birthday every year, progressing chronologically through the sequence of Zelda games.  This is going to be interesting....

I think he likes it.  :)  Also, he's had this shirt for years, but we also got him a Triforce winter hat and a little metal Zelda mint tin for his birthday this year.  He's my favorite dork.