Spiderman Chiffon Cake (with Blue pea flowers)

This is a Spiderman chiffon cake I made for a dear Devon who just turned 6! I love to bake for my favourite people and I am so thankful for the chance to try out something so fun too! The cake is vanilla chiffon cake coloured with beet/red yeast powder while the blue cake is vanilla chiffon cake coloured mostly naturally with blue pea flowers which I fell in love with. I was pretty happy that I could reduce the amount of blue food colouring tremendously with it.

The piping technique and protocol is similar to my Hello Kitty chiffon cupcakes/pops, so I will not go into detail. I further added 1/2 tsp cake flour to the black batter so that it will be less runny as this requires intricate piping. I baked the face in an oval glass bowl I inherited from my parents (remember to colour the face red here). You will have some spare red batter which you can pour into a 6-inch tray to cut out the letters later. The recipe for the vanilla chiffon cake with blue pea flowers is below. I bought these online from a nice friend.

Ingredients
3 egg yolks
20g castor sugar
40g vegetable oil
27g water
15g blue pea flower tea (50+ blue pea flowers soaked in 15g hot water)
5g vanilla extract
60g cake flour
Dip of blue gel food coloring (optional)

4 egg whites
45 g sugar
1/4 tsp cream of tartar

Method
1. Prepare the blue pea flower tea. Soak 50+ flowers in 15g hot water and let it simmer for at least 20 min. *Fresh flowers are much more intense than dried flowers.

2. Preheat oven to 160°C. 

3. Beat egg yolks with sugar with whisk till pale yellow before stirring in oil, water, vanilla extract and blue pea flower tea (sieve and press out the liquid).

4. Add in sieved flour and whisk till no trace of flour is found. *If you use fresh flowers, no blue coloring needs to be added. If you use dried flowers, you may want to add a dip of blue coloring to darken the shade.

5. Meringue: Beat the egg whites with ¼ tsp cream of tartar till firm peak, mixing in caster sugar in 2 additions.
6. Fold in the meringue gently into the batter 1/3 at a time.
7. Pour into tin and gently tap the tin on table 3x to remove air bubbles.
8. Bake the cake for 15 min at 160°C then 31 min at 140°C or until skewer comes out clean.
9. Invert immediately once out of the oven to cool.
10. Unmould by hand after the cake is cool (see video tutorial).

I heard that he loved the marshmallow surprise inside the cake!

Using the same recipe, I baked an extra black and white chiffon layer cake to do the detailing for the buildings and eyes. These were done by carving patterns out of the cake (mostly freehand) using a sharp carving knife.

The buildings were "built" onto the chiffon cake using melted marshmallows. Spidey is really to jump from building to building!

Happy birthday to Devon!!

With lots of love,

Susanne