Back in 2008, I posted an article where I showed you how I decorated cakes for my sons’ birthdays.
My eldest son’s Fiancée had seen this original article and requested a Capybara cake for her birthday this year.
The cakes and the icing are made by my wife, Jennifer, and I shape and decorate to achieve the end result.
If you don’t know what a Capybara is here is a summary from Wikipedia:
The capybara or greater capybara (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) is the largest living rodent, native to all countries in South America except Chile. It is a semiaquatic herbivore that inhabits savannas and dense forests, living near and in bodies of water and feeding mainly on grasses and aquatic plants.
Below is the photo that I was using for guidance creating the cake:
In the previous articles I only showed the end results, so this time I thought I would show some of the process.
I had created an initial sketch on paper of a Capybara sitting on its haunches so I could work out the base cakes needed. We decided on two loaf (rectangle) cakes and one square cake. So, Jennifer made the 3 cakes and once they had cooled, wrapped them in cling film and put them into the freezer.
The cakes need to be frozen so they can be carved with a bread knife into the shapes needed. When stacking the cakes we cut off the top surface to make it level. Wooden skewers were cut to length and used to hold the sections together. There were two shorter skewers in the back section and two longer skewers going through all three sections of cake for the front (head) section.
To get the front paws and the top of the hind quarters, extra pieces were cut from the removed part of the “head” cake. There was a little more carving after this picture to get the head and paws shaped better. We also added a section of the crust cut from the middle cake to make a better butt!
Once the shaping of the cakes was completed, we then used butter icing (frosting) to coat both surfaces of the different sections of cake and then stick them together. Combined with the “structural” skewers this should hold everything together. Then the rest of the cake was covered in icing, sometimes using additional icing to round out curves and give a more natural appearance.
We also made a lighter coloured icing (by mixing some plain icing with the chocolate icing) so the snout could be a bit lighter and give some variation in the coat. The nose was made from bottom half of a “sour cola bottle” candy and the eyes were also cut from a “sour cola bottle”. The ears were made from two Biscoff biscuits cut to length.
The final part of the process was to use a fork to create the fur texture in the icing.
Here’s the end result.
After a Birthday dinner at a local Italian Restaurant, we came home for coffee and cake. The cake was presented with mandarins* and candles and was very well received.
* The mandarin was added because it has become a meme. In 1982, a Japanese Zoo noticed that capybaras loved warm baths in winter and there is a custom of yuzu‑yu, where people place yuzu (a citrus fruit similar to a mandarin) into hot baths during the winter solstice for health and relaxation benefits. Zoos began floating yuzu in the capybara baths, and sometimes the fruit naturally settled on their heads – or keepers placed them there for enrichment and photos.
If you want the recipe for the cake and icing, here is the link to the document from the original article.
Hope you enjoyed the article. Sorry, you will have to make your own yummy cake.
David
This article was originally posted on https://www.winthropdc.com/blog.