Wonka Hat Blueberry Chiffon Cake (for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's 50th Anniversary)

I was very privileged to bake a celebratory pre-party cake for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's 50th anniversary for Penguin Books Singapore. Like many children in the world, I grew up loving Roald Dahl's inspiring and whacky tale of how young Charlie Bucket wins the Golden Ticket and the right to Willy Wonka's dream chocolate factory. I loved the imaginative and far out world inside the chocolate factory. This cover photo and the one below was very beautifully done by them. I couldn't have captured or adorned the cake with impact like them ;).

Can you tell that the Wonka hat was made of chiffon cake? :) I thought that chiffon cake was pretty suitable for making a hat as it gave it a soft, velvety and cloth-like finishing. The chiffon cake was blueberry flavoured so as to make use of as much natural food colouring as possible. As I shared previously in my lego post, blueberry powder (and blueberry extract here) is really great for natural purple food colouring. I also made blueberry puree to add to the flavour.

The Wonka hat is actually made up of a 15 cm blueberry chiffon cake on top of a 20 cm round layer chiffon cake! The bow and yellow Wonka "W" is made separately out of chiffon cake :).

Blueberry Chiffon Cake (makes one 15 cm chiffon tin + 20 cm layer cake, or one 17 cm chiffon tin)
3 egg yolks
20g sugar
39g vegetable oil
30 ml blueberry puree
2 ml blueberry extract
10 ml water
2 tsp of blueberry powder
52g cake flour
Charcoal powder

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

1. Prepare the blueberry puree by mashing 1/2 a punnet of ripe blueberries on a sieve and filtering out the skin (makes around 30 ml).

2. Preheat oven to 160°C. 

3. Beat egg yolks with sugar with whisk till pale yellow before stirring in oil, water and blueberry puree and extract.
4. Add in sieved flour and whisk till no trace of flour found.
5. Add in blueberry powder and mix well (batter will be light purple). I further added in a dip of purple colouring as a purple hat was needed.
6. Scoop out 10 tsp into another bowl and add 1/4 tsp of charcoal powder for the hat ribbon. Scoop out another 3 tsp and add yellow colouring for the “W”.
7. Meringue: Beat the egg whites with ¼ tsp cream of tartar till stiff peak, mixing in caster sugar in 2 additions.
8. Scoop over 20 tbsp meringue to the dark purple batter and fold in gently. Transfer another 6 tbsp meringue to the yellow batter and do likewise. Spread the yellow batter and 2 tbsp of dark purple batter onto a baking paper-lined small tray. Bake at 160°C for 14 min.
9. Fold the rest of the meringue into the purple batter in 3 additions. Fill a 15 cm chiffon tin to 2/3 full and scoop the dark purple batter over the light purple. Spread the rest of the purple batter over a 20 cm round baking tray (lined at the bottom). Bake the chiffon cake at 160°C  for 15 min and then 23 min at 150°C . Bake the tray for 15 min at 160°C .
10. Invert the chiffon tin once it removed from oven and leave to cool on a cooling rack.
11. Unmould the chiffon cake by hand. (Watch The Baking Biatch for an excellent video tutorial on hand unmoulding chiffon cakes). For the 20 cm round cake, flip over the cake onto a clean baking sheet and allow to cool completely.

Place the chiffon cake onto the 20 cm round cake. No glue is required as the bottom of the chiffon cake will be a little “sticky”. I traced out a “wonky” W and then used a sharp carving knife to cut out the letter from the yellow cake. I did likewise for the sweets bow. 

Here's my Wonka hat! Opps! The purple from the blueberry colouring was probably insufficient for long baking times. I ended up having a little browning on top of the chiffon cake (looked like a gradient from brown to purple). 

I ended up painting the whole cake with blueberry powder in water (blueberry juice) to get a purple cake! But it looked much better after that :).

As you can see, they did a great job in transforming a simple chiffon hat into a Willy Wonka's hat! Their FB page and event details can be found here! 

With love,

Susanne