A friend of mine has asked me to bake a cake for her daughter’s birthday. My friend’s daughter was whose birthday coincides with St. Patrick’s Day. I decided to bake a cake that will look like a four leaf shamrock.

A lucky shamrock cake can be very easily done using a small heart cake pan. If you have a set of three heart cake pans for a tier cake- use the smallest one.

You will need to bake four heart shape cakes, then turn them round so all the bottom of each hear almost touch each other.. The stem part can be baked in a simple rectangular bread pan.

It took me about 5 hours to make the flowers and the cake topper. To bake, assemble and decorate the cake required another 4.5 hours.

Although fondant cakes look great, the assembling and decorations needs to be done the last minute as fondant can not be refrigerated.

I got the idea for this cake by flipping though some old magazine. The original cake was actually three teared cake, where the top two tears where sitting on top of a spider and a third little spider was on the very top of the cake. Not only it was too complicated to make, I did not have enough people to eat even if I did make it.

It gave me an idea however for the cake pictured here. To make this cake I used 13 inch round cake pan, a 4 inch cup cake (for the body of the spider), plenty of fondant and thick pretzel sticks (to make spider’s legs).

The pumpkins around the base of the cake were made of fondant as well.

It is good idea to prepare your fondant ahead of time by dividing and coloring the fondant for the different parts of the cake. You can keep your fondant in a zip lock plastic container to prevent it from drying out.

If you have never worked with fondant before, you should remember not to store your cake in refrigerator as the moisture and fondant do not go well together. This is also why you will probably be much better off to fill your cake with butter cream icing instead of custard or whipped cream icing as both can go bad very quickly if not refrigerated. While butter cream can be stored at room temperature for 2 to 3 days.

If you need good book on fondant decorating techniques, I highly recommend The Cake Decorator’s Motif Bible: 150 Fabulous Fondant Designs with Easy-to-Follow Charts and Photographs

So without any further ado, here is how the cake came out:

The little baby angle was decorative (non eatable). But it can be a nice reminder of the baptism for the family to keep.

When coloring the icing, you should be very careful not to put to much color. It is always better to add more, because it is hard to fix if you add to much color. Just use the tooth pick dipping one end into the coloring and adding one little drop of die at a time.

The inside of the cake is only limited by your imagination. If my memory serves me well, the cake in the picture was a chocolate cake. All the decorating was done in icing.