The cake itself was an orange and dark chocolate marble cake.  Yes, it was absolutely as moist and delicious as it looks.



It's iced with orange flavoured white chocolate ganache which was incredibly delicious.  We were very lucky that any of it made it onto the cake because of all the tasting it encouraged: it wasn't too sweet and it was very orangey.  The basic recipe was 1:3 heavy cream to white chocolate melts.  I mixed the cream with the zest of a couple of oranges for 24 hours, and then brought it up to the boil before straining out the orange zest.  I poured the hot cream over the white chocolate, leaving for a couple of minutes to even out the temperature, then adding a tablespoon of apple vinegar and a pinch of salt to balance the sweetness of the white chocolate, and stirred it together, giving a couple of thirty second bursts in the microwave to melt the last little bit of the chocolate.  It was SO DELICIOUS and the perfect texture to work with.  If you've never iced with ganache before YOU SHOULD, it is my absolute favourite.  It's easy to use, sets firm, melts in your mouth, and tastes just like eating chocolate +/- whatever you've infused it with.  

I used gel colours to tint most of the mix orange, tinted some yellow, and left the last bit plain.  I waited for the ganache to thicken before icing the whole cake in plain orange, smoothing and sharpening the edges with a hot knife, then scraped the top layer off in the places I wanted paler colours, using the yellow to ease the transition between orange and plain and photos of actual tigers to create the base colour variation.  

 

Looks bizarre without the stripes, doesn't it?  Once I was happy with that, I used the same picture to paint on the face using melted dark chocolate--and suddenly it all made sense.  I worked my way out from there, painting stripes..



After I'd done all of the head and body, I realised there wasn't really a good place to put a bandage, nor was there any unfortunate disaster that needed covering with one, so I suggested to Mr Five Years Old (who was at the time industriously bandaging his stuffed cheetah's tail) that we could give the tiger cake a tail and bandage that.  I got the go ahead, so I moulded the tail out of Rice Krispy Treat, and iced and painted it with the leftovers.  I used white fondant to make a bandage, pressed it onto the surface of a (clean!) splatter screen to get a bandage texture (which doesn't look very obvious in the picture but is there when you look close) and cut segments to wrap around his tail.  I coloured a little extra fondant the same colours and made ears, which I moulded around toothpicks, and then left to dry until the morning of the party before painting the back and outer rim with chocolate and placing in.

 


Mr Five Years Old was utterly thrilled with the realisation of his artistic vision.  :D  I was pretty darn pleased with it too.