AlphaBakes Challenge - Bleeding Heart Cake

Another AlphaBakes entry, this month the letter is B. I'm trying to get more involved with doing challenges and I really like this one so I thought I'd enter it again. This month hosted by the ever lovely The More Than Occasional Baker. What I really love is that the letter that is picked can relate to the type of bake too rather than the official name. So 'B' can be bananas, or it can be bread! So it opens up a whole variety of options.

This time I thought I would enter probably one of my favourite cakes, the Bleeding Heart cake! I made it for my brother's 30th and it's in my top 3 of most visited posts, next to Angel Layer Cake...what does that say?! I did think about baking something from scratch rather than using an old post but it's been so crazy here I've just not had time at all, but then this is such a fun post I thought why not?

I'd seen this cake on the Lily Vanilli blog. It did tell you how to make the heart but I didn't really understand the instructions so I kind of winged it. I'd told my brother so many times that I wouldn't make this cake I knew he wouldn't suspect that this is the cake I would actually make for his birthday.

The cake itself is a two tiered vanilla sponge cake filled with strawberry jam and vanilla buttercream.  I iced the the cake with plain white fondant as I wanted the heart and blood to really stand out, it almost had to look a bit clinical.

For the heart, I used a block of cake and sculpted it into the shape of a fist, as that's what they say your heart looks like. I kind of just did it until I thought it looked right as human hearts aren't something that I'm really that used to looking at (with the exception of a strange art project when I was 16). I made the red fondant with lots of Christmas Red sugarflair colouring paste and didn't mix it all in as I wanted some bits to be a bit darker in places. Beware when using this much food colouring paste, you will end up looking like you killed a clown!

I made it a lot bigger than it needed to be, laid the sponge in the middle and wrapped the fondant cup almost in a parcel type way and joined it at the top. I used the excess fondant to make three valves at the top, the folds from these in the icing then actually looked like veins too, I even added some extra colour to them to make them look naturally darker.

To make the blood I bought some strawberry golden syrup and added some extra red to make it a bit darker and realistic. I brushed this all over the heart before putting it on the top. I then drizzled it all over letting it slosh over the first tier dripping down. When it had dripped down into puddles I edged it over the next tier to make it look like it had glooped all of the way down.

We did have candles to put on it but we let him see it without first so he could see the full effect. Luckily he absolutely loved it - he's not a psycho I promise! He really hadn't expected to get it so that was a major bonus. I really think I've started something now and that there may well be a lot more gore in the future....

 

Nom! x


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