I made this cake in collaboration with my sister for my getting-far-too-big nephew’s birthday. He requested a bee cake, so bee cake it was! As I now live on the other side of the world I couldn’t make it to his birthday, I wanted to come up with a cake she could make for him. So I made two versions, one easier for her beginner baking skills and one for me to co-celebrate the cake I wanted to make for him. We came up with a bee, flower, rainbow garden cake so that she could add real flowers and a jelly tot rainbow to make the design easy peasy, while I could have my fun piping out buttercream flowers.
I made some bees from fondant for the cake, which do take a little time, but are easyish to make. Though to save my sister some time and be able to contribute to the cake, I carefully packaged the bees up and sent them to her so that she got to use them for her cake. And surprisingly they made it there all in one piece! And yes when the party came all the kiddos thought they were chocolate bees, excitedly picked them all off the cake, biting into them disappointedly realising they weren’t. Apart from that one kid who just really liked the fondant!
Decorating the cake
You’ll want to make the fondant bees and chocolate soil as described below. Then for the flowers and cookie rainbow either follow the beginner version or the more adventurous version depending on your piping skills.
Create the flower garden by first adding a layer of chocolate soil all over the top of the cake. Place your cookie rainbow towards the back of the cake, keeping it up with toothpicks stuck into the cake behind.
Making all the decorations can be made a few days ahead of time so that you can spread out the making of the cake to make things easier. Just store the piped buttercream items in the fridge, the rest you can store in an airtight container.
To make the bees:
Add some yellow food colouring, with a tiny bit of orange for a deeper yellow, to about 1/2 cup of fondant icing and mix it all in till evenly coloured. Roll into small slightly oval ball shapes and stick on top of a small round wooden skewer. With some black food colouring carefully paint on the bee stripes and eyes onto the bees.
Roll a bit of white fondant and using a large round piping tip about 2cms wide cut out the bee wings, then place the wings on top of each bee pressing down in the middle slightly to make it stick.
For the chocolate soil:
I mixed chocolate cookie crumbs (store bought) with a couple of tablespoons of melted coconut oil till it resembled crumbly soil.
For the cookie rainbow:
I made a small batch of my sugar cookie dough, dividing my recipe by 1/3. (for the egg, whisk one egg in a bowl and add 15g of egg for 1/3 of the recipe and you can just omit the baking powder here). After rolling the dough to about 5mm thick, I cut a rainbow shape by using a large circle cookie cutter about 6inchs wide, then a smaller circle inside about 2inchs wide, then cut the whole circle in half, which will make two rainbow shapes.
For the beginner version: stick some Jelly Tots or other rainbow coloured candy on the rainbow cookie with white chocolate.
For the more adventurous baker: Mix some buttercream with the different colours of the rainbow. Pipe a row of each colour using a small star piping tip.
Flowers
For the beginner version:
Choose some cake safe flowers to decorate. Here is a good guide on what flowers are safe and how to prepare your flowers. Chrysanthemums and carnations are safe and a good size for the cake. You want to trim the stalks about 1 inch long and wrap the ends in plastic wrap before placing them into the buttercream.
For the more adventurous baker
Pipe buttercream flowers and keep in the fridge to firm up till ready to decorate. I used american buttercream to pipe them but swiss meringue buttercream works very well too. You can find tutorials on how to pipe buttercream flowers here, here and here. When the flowers are cold, carefully transfer them and create a flower border around the cake. Then use leaf piping tips to create foliage around the flowers filling in any gaps.
Banana Choc Chip Bee Birthday Cake
Ingredients
480g (3 3/4 cups) all purpose flour
3 tsps baking powder
3/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp salt
225g (1 cup) flavourless oil
450g (2 1/4 cups) dark brown sugar
3 eggs
2 tsp vanilla extract
750g banana, about 6 bananas
350g (2 cups) chocolate chips
150g (1 cup) of toffee pieces (optional)
Cream Cheese Frosting
1 cup (230g) full fat cream cheese, softened
1 cup (225g) unsalted butter butter, softened
690g – 750g (5 1/2 – 6 cups) icing sugar
2 tsps vanilla extract
Buttercream for decoration
225g (1 cup) unsalted butter, softened
425–500g (3 1/2 – 4 cups) icing sugar
2 tbsps whole milk
food colouring
Instructions
Heat the oven to 350F. Grease 3, 8 inch cake pans.
Puree the banana in a blender till smooth.
In a large bowl whisk all the dry ingredients till thoroughly mixed. In another bowl whisk all the wet ingredients together with the banana puree. Add the dry ingredients and mix until just combined.
Divide the batter evenly between the cake pans. Bake and check for doneness after 30mins or until a toothpick into the middle comes out clean. Allow to cool for 10mins and then transfer to a cooling rack.
Frosting
Whisk the cream cheese, butter and vanilla with electric mixer or whisk for 5mins on medium till light and fluffly.
Turn down to low and slowly add the icing sugar one cup at a time till fully mixed in. Turn up to medium high and beat till light and fluffly.
To assemble
Slice any dooming off the top of the cake layers. Frost a thick layer of frosting over the top of each cake layer and stack on top of each other. Using a palette knife first spread a thinner crumb coat layer of frosting all over the cake and chill in the fridge till firm. Then spread a thick layer of frosting all over the assembled cake.
For how to decorate see above.
