Ballerina Cake

Not long ago while I was doing laundry, washing dishes or sweeping the floor, I began to consider a question we used to ask in algebra class, "Will I ever even use this?" It seems funny, in light of my life now, how much we worked at equations and how I stressed over the fact that my school didn't offer calculus. Do I even use it? After some thought, I realized I do use an algebraic equation to determine how much my total will be at Target taking a 7% sales tax into consideration. Most of my other math duties are confined to addition and subtraction.

But I did have another opportunity to dust off my hard earned (though comparably meager) math skills: making a ballerina cake.

I am posting this cake in it's full glory because I could not find another place online where someone had made it - other than Family Fun related websites. I am sure the reason is - the cake as made in Family Fun is 3 feet tall and includes two whole cakes and 16 twinkies - it is a behemoth of a cake! In fact, when preparing to make it, I could not even find anything suitable to use as a cake-board for a 3 foot tall cake.

However, I was already committed to making this for a friend's daughters, so I found my biggest round baking pan and started reducing. Here is the un-iced cake:

The original recipe called for the head and arms to be baked in a 12 inch round, my biggest round was 10 inches - which is .83(repeating) of 12 inches. So I had to reduce each part of the cake to 83(repeating)% of it's original size to maintain proportions. I have learned the hard way not to just guess! Icing is forgiving, but only to a point!

I baked about 3/4 of the chocolate cake in the 10 inch round and the rest in a loaf pan (made most of the legs). I trimmed reduced the 8.5"x11" cake to 7.5" and a smidge over 9". The extra pieces went to make the feet and the twinkies were not needed at all.

Interestingly, the cake itself was 83% of it's original size, but elimnating the twinkies and other extras, reduced the cost by almost half.

The original cake called for chocolate icing, but the birthday girls are fair skinned, so I adjusted.


All iced, no decorations:


The finished product:


A couple of other reducing notes. The recipe suggested Junior Mints for eyes, but at the smaller size, they were way too big. I piped some white ovals and added a blue baking sized M&M. I made the mouth with an Airhead and piped on the laces on the legs, the recipe called for wrapping them in red shoestring licorice, but I thought the red didn't really match. I also sprinkled the leotard with lavender colored sugar, it looked really nice. The recipe called for "3 small packages of cotton candy" for the tutu, but I used about half of one 2 oz container. I guess cotton candy is not packaged uniformly!

And a note about the tutu - the cotton candy melted after we moved it (too hot in the van?). I added more, but the girls' older brother periodically passed by and took samples, until by the time they ate it, it was all gone again.