Fruit Ninja Cake

I’m so happy that now that I’m back in California I can make birthday cakes for my little friend Isaac again!  He really loves the game Fruit Ninja and he really loves numbers, so I went for a Fruit Ninja cake that prominently featured the number seven.  At one point I had planned to make the base shaped like four number sevens, but fortunately Isaac’s mom pointed out that my sketch looked disturbingly like a swastika, so I shaped it like six number sevens instead.  Cakewreck narrowly avoided!

Isaac was celebrating at the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, so I had to make a cake small and portable enough that it could survive the hour drive over windy roads and conveniently be served in the middle of a busy amusement park.  By my standards, then, this cake was remarkably practical.  The only problem was that it was too windy to light the candles.

Basically, the number seven is a wooden cut-out covered with fondant to look like the background of Fruit Ninja.  The slashes that are cutting the fruit are poured isomalt.  All the little fruits are cake covered with modeling chocolate.  I started with a basic white cake recipe and then added fresh squeezed fruit juices and zests so that each cake is flavored like the appropriate fruit.  The lime, orange, and pineapple worked especially well.  It turns out to be pretty hard to get kiwi flavor and watermelon flavor to translate into cake.  For the bombs, I added a little bit of Tabasco sauce.  I think they had a little bite at the end, but I didn’t want them to be too powerful since kids would be eating them.