BURRITOCAKE

[telophase]

I made this for Toby, not this past weekend but the previous weekend.



It's a chocolate rolled cake, filled with a marshmallow-type filling and slathered in buttercream before being rolled up in orange fondant and decorated to look like Toby's usual order at Freebird's World Burrito. Which is a steak burrito on cayenne, with mixed cheese (white AND yellow), mixed rice (Spanish and cilantro), a bit of corn salsa, black beans, cilantro, and sour cream. Missing: red onion and whatever sauce he usually gets. Also, he hates guac but I had to make some anyway. :)

Mixed cheese, rice, and cilantro played by coconut dyed the appropriate color with food coloring. Steak is candied pecans, Raisinettes in the role of black beans, Swedish fish chopped up to stand for corn salsa, and buttercream frosting for sour cream and guac, with extra Swedish fish bits in the guac for tomatoes and jalapenos. The tortilla was made with fondant kneaded with food coloring until it got somewhere near the right shade of orange, then I hit it with a kitchen blowtorch in spots to get the browned bits that you can't really see in this picture.

(What does buttercream frosting with Swedish fish mixed in taste like? About what you'd expect: pretty nasty. Gummy bears next time!)

It was more a triumph of showmanship than taste, alas--I'm not talking about the toppings, but the cake itself. I screwed up and bought the wrong size jelly roll pan, so it was too big and I overcooked the cake. And then the marshmallow filling decided it really wanted to be liquid at room temperature and had a tendency to drain out. At least the buttercream slathered over in underneath the fondant was good!

I'd do it again, but double the cake recipe to account for the pan and just make extra buttercream and fill it with that.

Comments

[movingfinger]

Jesus H


ETA: You know, candied/crystallized fruit, or those fruit-jelly slices, would be better than Swedish fish or gummy bears, I think. (Or go wild with marzipan.)

How big is this? Is it bigger than his head?

[telophase]

It was bigger than his head, yes. With the fondant on. Probably about the size of his head or a little less for the actual edible bits. Yes, I have Opinions about fondant. And, well, there were decently large air spaces in part of it since the overcooked cake was both too thin and too dense to roll well, even though I rolled it straight out of the oven and let it cool that way before putting the filling in and re-rolling, on the advice of America's Test Kitchen.

Candied fruit might work, if I can source it at Central Markup. Not into running around to sixty different places. :) Will take a look next time I'm there.

[movingfinger]

King Arthur Flour sells fresh fruit-tasting candied fruit by mail order, the kind that is meant for fruitcakes. The cherries are good.

The jelly fruit slice things I'm thinking of are the neon-colored sugar-crusted semicircular fake citrus things. Like Chuckles.

[loligo]

That is an astonishing feat.

[telophase]

Thank you!

[laurashapiro]

That is amazingly clever.

[telophase]

Thank you!

However I have to admit I got the idea when this album was posted to Reddit. (I made the choice to go messy, though--it's best when all the innards are mixed up!)

[laurashapiro]

Still, you are brave to attempt it! And you had some great solutions for the burrito-ness of it all.

[telophase]

The hard part was also the fun part--figuring out how to replicate all the burrito toppings. :D Well, kneading the damn fondant was hard, but more because of tedium than any inherent difficulty.

spork of fooding

[yhlee]

Wow! If I weren't looking too closely I would take that as an actual giant burrito. =)

Re: spork of fooding

[telophase]

Thank you!

[mindyklasky.livejournal.com]

Color me very impressed!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :D