Hidden Cat Cake

It is time to reveal the secret of my Hidden Cat Cake (and other hidden shapes I have tried and will try using the same technique) - which is not a secret at all. Phew. It is not even my [hiddenwhatever] cake. Dull enough, it is simply this recipe I found from BBC Good Food which is one of the many few food magazines I buy regularly, and the recipe and idea sounded exciting to try. To be honest, it is not that exciting at all because you have to start by baking one boring cake before you can even start with the seriously exciting part. And it takes time to wait for the cakes to cool down, too.

Simply, the idea is to first bake one cake which you use for your desired hidden shape. Then you make another cake batter of different colour and carefully place the cats (or hearts) you stamped out of the first cake tightly in a row in the middle of the second cake batter in the (loaf) pan before baking the final cake in the oven.

Finding compatible shapes and (loaf) pans has been a challenge for me as too often the cookie shape I want to use is too big and the loaf pan I have is too small. (as you can see from the black cat below, there should have been a little more yellow batter around it - the ear tips are not perfect). Sometimes the desired cookie shape cannot be used in a cake like this at all - think about number 8 as a shape, for example. It would be hard to get the holes filled with batter. Not impossible, I guess, but a lot of work. (and no, the eyes of the cat below are not batter, they are yellow icing I piped into the cake when it was baked and cooled down). 

I love this idea a lot and I am going to bake many, many hidden shape cakes! And yes, cat is my favourite shape, but the perfect cat shape is still to be found. Not too big, no sharp angles, has to be easily recognised as a cat unlike....

...this one which was  the first Hidden Cat Cake I made. It hardly looks like a cat, rather a duck, I would say, so I am not using this shape any more. - For the shape batter in this cake I used cocoa powder and a little brown food colour paste.

For St.Patrick's Day I wanted to find a shamrock cookie shape. I needed to get one the very day so I went to my favourite kitchenware shop Stock in Dublin 2. They had huge shamrocks and some middle-sized ones which still looked a tiny bit too big, but the end result was satisfying enough. - To colour the shape batter, I simply used green food colour.

This is my first ever Hidden Heart Cake which I made for Valentine's Day and I followed the original recipe very carefully. I was extremely happy with the end result and it was great to see how amazed the kids were when I started cutting the cake. I had checked how the heart turned out but then I covered the whole cake with chocolate ganache to hide the heart again. 

I have found the magazine's batter recipe excellent for this cake. I am sure you can use other cake batters as well (for example ones with no almond), just make sure the batter is quite tight. If the cake rises a lot and becomes airy the hidden shape will not stay in one piece and/or keep its shape that well.

Hints&Tips

*There will be leftovers from the first cake. Do not throw them away but crumb them and use them as a base for a cheesecake. (depending on the colour - not sure if a cheesecake with bright blue base would look very appealing...)