Link Cake

The Nutella cake recipe I featured yesterday? This is what I transformed it into. This is a cake decorated to look like the character Link from the famous Zelda video games. I am not much of a video-gamer myself, and I have never actually played a Zelda game (*GASP*), but I relied on internet images to make this cake look as accurate as possible.  It is based on a sprite, which refers to a computer pixel image. By using a sprite, it is easy to divide the character into different squares to easily ice the cake. It was also a bonus that this particular design only required three different colors: brown, green, and white, which made things a lot easier. I used tinted buttercream and a chocolate Nutella frosting to match the chocolate Nutella cake. The method of this design is very similar to the method I used to make the Minecraft cake last year (see January 18th, 2012). 

To make this cake, I began with a rectangular chocolate Nutella cake. I started by dirty-icing the entire cake in chocolate Nutella icing. I marked out a pattern of squares, each 1.5cm x 1.5cm in the icing, using a ruler. I used a basketweave tip turned upside down, so that the lines (or basket weave) would not show to pipe the different colors into the pattern of squares. Essentially, this made just a flat tip. I piped straight lines to fill in all of the squares. I did one color at a time, as I only have one basketweave tip, and needed to clean it between different colors. This was a fairly simple cake to make. The piping was not difficult, as it consisted simply of lines and squares. It was a very fun cake to make though, and although it may seem a bit tedious, I didn't find that at all. I finished off with a simple zigged border around the bottom edge and a reversed shell border around the top edge. I had just enough room under the Link character to write Happy Birthday.