Making Birthday Brain Cake

Hi Internet People,

It’s bonus iZombie kitchen day this lovely Friday the 13th. Rahul Kohli tweeted earlier this week that his birthday was today and I thought that was a perfect excuse to try and make a brain cake. It was definitely a bit of an adventure. I haven’t baked a cake in ages and I’ve never attempted to make a cake shaped like something without baking it in a mold first. I went to the store earlier this week and grabbed strawberry cake mix, strawberry icing, and red decorating icing. I assumed I had everything else I needed at home and I was able to make it work. Here are the supplies I used for the cake itself.

The box mix called for three eggs for each box, but it turned out I only had four eggs in the fridge. You can use banana instead of eggs in recipes in a pinch so I swapped out half a banana for each of the missing eggs. Sorry, that sounds a bit confusing. I made each box separately because I knew I’d need to layer cakes. For each box I used half a cup of oil, a cup of water, two eggs, and half a banana. Here’s what all of that looked like in the bowl.

After mixing it for two minutes on medium speed with a hand mixer it definitely looked a lot smoother.

Totally forgot to take a picture of the batter, but it came out of the bowl really easily. I kind of didn’t read the directions and poured the entire batch into a 9×11 circular pan, according to the box I was supposed to pour it into two different circular pans, but I only had the one and I honestly didn’t think it would matter. I put the pan in the oven and set a timer for 34 minutes. I wound up putting a cooking sheet under the pan to keep it from spilling all over the oven.

I tested the cake with a toothpick after the 34 minutes and it came out cleanly so I pulled it out and let it cool on the counter.

When I made the first cake I forgot to spray the pan with non-stick spray and it didn’t come out very cleanly, I actually might have lost about a third of the cake. It looked really tasty though.

Well, not only did I forget to spray that pan, but I burned myself taking the first cake out of the oven. I told you I’m a klutz.

The second cake went a lot smoother. I remembered to spray the pan and didn’t burn myself so I’m calling it a win. I let that one cool and got ready to layer the two cakes. Now normally I wouldn’t complain about how moist, yes I know people hate that word, but I don’t know how else to describe it, a cake is, but these strawberry cakes were falling apart the entire time I tried to stack and frost them. I did get the cakes on top of each other, I used icing to keep them together. Then I cheated a bit and shoved the plastic brain mold that I used to make my jello brain over the cake. That helped give the newly merged two layer cake into the right shape.

I then got to work putting strawberry frosting all over the cake. I used a spatula, a plastic baggie cut to work like a piping bag, and in a couple instances my fingers. They were clean I swear!

Frosting the cake took me a bit of time, but once I had it covered in strawberry frosting I thought it looked pretty brainy.

 

I then added some red decorating icing in some swirly shapes to give it some cartoony lobe like details.

  

My swirls aren’t great, but the cake tasted really good and made my place smell pleasantly like strawberries the entire time I was baking. I’m sure people could make way better versions of this cake and I’d love to see what you can make. You can share pics with me either on Twitter, @kleffnotes, or in the comments below. I also posted a new video on YouTube that you can check out on my kleffnotes channel. You can also check me out on The Nerdy Girl Express.

Talk to ya tomorrow,

Katherine