Carrot Cake - shaped like a carrot and airbrushed

What's more appropriate for the Easter bunny than a carrot cake... and this one is shaped like a carrot!

I made this cake for my friend A's birthday in February; she is vegan and I've made her a few types of cake before but never a carrot cake. I also got an airbrushing kit for Christmas which I hadn't tried out and thought this would be a good opportunity. I remembered seeing a cake in a book once which I no longer have, that was shaped like a carrot and thought that was a great way to present a carrot cake!

The recipe is from the Vegan Society website which you can see by clicking the link. The cake seemed very dense, a bit like a fruit cake, but by the time we came to eat it a day later it was lovely and moist. It tasted delicious and for any vegan-sceptics first of all you wouldn't know from the taste that this cake was vegan - and secondly, vegan cakes taste delicious anyway!

Mixing the dry ingredients

Adding the wet ingredients

Ready to go in the oven - I used a loaf tin for the shape I needed

On a cooling rack - a little overdone on one edge but this didn't matter as I was going to cut that part off

I carved the cake roughly into the shape of a carrot

I covered it in a thin layer of vegan buttercream

And then covered it in white fondant, which is also vegan

This is the airbrush kit I got for Christmas, it's really cool!

Here's what you get inside the kit - a compressor, airbrush pen and a few colours. My boyfriend also bought me a separate box of edible colours.

The airbrush is quite easy to use at a basic level though I need more practice to get really good! You only need a couple of drops of colour and the airbrush is easy to control. You move it around in small circles to get an even coverage and can build up a darker colour by going over the same spot again, or by bringing the airbrush closer to the cake. The white fondant takes the colour really well and it doesn't take long to dry.

I covered a cake board in white fondant and sprayed that green, making some patches darker than others for a grass effect

I wanted to make the greenery to go on the end of the carrot, and tried a couple of things to attach it and eventually settled on a plastic dowel

I stuck it into a piece of fondant with part of the dowel sticking out, so I could push this into the end of the cake. I then used a knife to shape the end of the fondant to look like the carrot top

Here's the finished cake - what do you think?

 

I'm sharing this with the Love Cake challenge, hosted by Ness at JibberJabberUK, as the theme is spring.