Delectables with Dan: Phil Lester Inspired Patchwork Cake!

Greetings and Salutations fellow baking perverts! 

Since the Daniel Howell inspired pastel cake was such a massive success, I've decided to do a Phil inspired one too. Today I'm joined by lil Phil instead of Pork Chop, but don't worry, he'll be back in the next instalment of Delectables with Dan. I've really liked doing these cakes based on the Dan and Phil 2018 calendar, so starting in January of 2018 I'm going to try and do a cake inspired by the colour scheme/ theme of each month. 

We'll let's get baking, shall we?

To make the cake you will need:
1 box yellow cake mix. (I'd not use white since it's a less stable cake to work with.)
Food Colourings (don't use the gels) (Red, Blue & Purple)
**If you can't find purple, that's okay you can make your own with red and blue.

To make the icing you will need: 

625g icing sugar

113g softened butter 

2 tablespoons milk (you can use 3 if you so desire)
2 tablespoons of vanilla essence (preferably the white, but the brown works just as well.)

Prepare your standard yellow cake mix by adding in eggs, oil and water. Mix on high speed with an electric blender until batter is smooth and silky. Make sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl when blending. Once mixture is evenly blended, you will need to separate it out into three different bowls to add your food colouring. You don't need to use massive bowls, small cereal bowls will do the job with this. 

Once you've separated your batter into 3 separate bowls, add a small amount of blue food colouring into the first bowl and mix until it's a pale blue in colour. (When it comes out of the oven will be a pale-blue green colour. The next blue we are going to do is going to be a little darker and will be more of a tropical colour in the bowl. (When it comes out of the oven it will be a darker, rich turquoise blue colour.) Next, if you don't have purple food colouring, you can combine some of your red and blue to make a rich, dark eggplant purple colour. Next comes the fun drizzle part. I like to think about chubbs when I'm dripping my delicious batter into the greased baking pans. Remember to grease them like you would a lover when you're poolside in the tropics, you don't want the cake getting stuck. Ladel large portions of the different coloured portions of batter in the cake pans. Create a nice colourful array and smooth out the batter to make sure that it's evenly spread. It will create a nice swirl design as you do so. Put into bake for 20-25 minutes at 180C (350F). Test to make sure your cake is baked before removing from oven. You don't want to be running around half-baked. 

Once you remove your cakes from the oven, still in their tins let them cool on a heat-safe surface for about 15 minutes before putting them into the icebox to chill. Make sure that your cakes are chilled like a menopausal woman in the bedroom before removing them from the icebox. Carefully tap the bottom of the cake pans and free the cakes from their bake prisons. Have them sing the tune of freedom for a minute before icing them.

Let's Make Some Icing!
You can't ice a cake without any icing and you know me, I usually have some left over for bedroom antics and that's why I don't have any photos of the icing making process like I often do. It's a simple buttercream and really doesn't need photos anyway. In a large mixing bowl cream together 1/4 of your icing sugar and butter. With an electric mixer on low speed begin to beat the two together. Start out slow, we don't need a full on Chris-Rhianna situation just yet. Add in another 1/4 of your icing sugar and add in your vanilla essence. Pick up the speed like your about to cut someone off in a roundabout. Scrape the sides of the bowl down before adding in the rest of your icing sugar and milk. If you have the setting for whip, I'd use that one and go to town for about two minutes until your icing is thicc, stiff and creamy....I used those same words in a sentence earlier today but in a completely different way. Context, people. It's important. 

Before you separate your white icing out into the three colours that we're going to be using we need to use it to hold our cakes together. Setting one cake on a flat surface, ice the top of the cake, really the cake's bottom, but seeing as the cake is arse over teakettle I'm calling it the top.) You want to make sure the top of your second cake is flat so it's even when you ice it and add decorations later on so either with a cake leveller or serrated knife, carefully remove the cake's foreskin. Apply a decent amount of icing and place the second cake on top. Press down gently, like your caressing a lover almost.

 

With an icing spatula, add a few large dollops of white icing onto the top of the cake and carefully, lovingly spread your delicious white icing all over the top, evenly coating it, like you're giving your partner a facial...if you know what I mean. Oh dear, this is getting rather sexual....before we bust a nut, let's move on, shall we? Along the sides of the cake apply a thin layer of icing. Just enough to barely cover the cake. It's going to work as a base for the next layer of icing. 

Separate the remainder of your icing out into three separate parts and re-create the two tones of blue and purple that you used to make the cake. Around the sides of the cake, put splotches of all three different icing colours all over and using an icing spatula, blend them together to make a patchwork wave of colour along the sides of the cake. Make small waves or smooth it if you wish, but be sure to hide all of the white icing underneath. Using icing bags and a star tip, we're going to do little starbursts along the rim of the cake alternating between colours. In the centre of the cake do a starburst of each colour before sprinkling the icing with sprinkles. 

And there we have it! A brilliantly coloured Phil Lester Inspired cake! The Phil inspired creations always have various shades of blue in them...I guess it's not just because he wears blue, but because it suits him. We'll have to see what the coming months have in store in regards to Phil inspired creations. This one was a lot easier to work with the darker shades actually. I found the pastel tones harder to work with and I thought it would be the other way around. Anyway, if you make one of the Dan inspired one, tweet me your results! I'd love to see your variations and creativity!

 

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