Pigs in Mud on a Cake

Ages ago, I found this picture.

From this place.

I immediately knew I wanted to make it for my friend Kaelin's birthday. So this weekend, I set to it. I made my melted ice cream cake (from the Cake Mix Doctor cookbook): a pint of Chocolate Explosion Ben and Jerry's, a chocolate fudge cake mix, and three eggs, baked at 350 for about 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, this was the weekend in which I learned exactly why you don't put a whole cake mix into an 8-inch round pan. The cake ended up with a muffin top.

No problem; once it cooled, I needed to cut part of the top off to frost it, anyway. So while it cooled, I made fondant piggies. I've never worked with fondant, before, but it was a lot like clay. Except if the fondant is perfect and your hands are slightly moist, you end up with glop in your hands. But the piggies turned out well.

(There is a little pig-butt in the upper left corner.)

Next, I sliced the top off of the cake, so I could work on a flat cake surface. This did not work very well. I highly advise not slicing crookedly.

Luckily, the ganache topping would cover it, I hoped. But first, the sides. I frosted them with chocolate icing and attached Kit Kats.

It was an incredibly warm day when I did this. The chocolate was so many kinds of melty. Rather than fingerprinting the whole cake, I stuck the candy in the fridge and waited till it had solidified again.

Then I continued. The awesome thing about this cake is that if the frosting oozes between the candy, it just looks like the pigs were splashing in the mud.

I'd mixed up the chocolate ganache earlier (1 cup of boiling heavy cream over 12 ounces of dark chocolate, whisked and allowed to cool). I poured it on the cake, covering the whole surface up to the edges, and then placed the piggy fondant pieces.

The white thing is a bar of soap. And I'm especially proud of the curly tail.

As was hoped, Kaelin loved her cake. I realized halfway through making it that this counts as one of my 25 things: baking something more complicated than usual and making other people eat it. It's not as picturesque as the original, but I think it was decent for a first try with fondant and ganache (and making it from memory, as I didn't have the picture in front of me).

My evil mission was a success.