Mr. Men / Little Miss Cake

I am not personally a fan of the Mr. Men / Little Miss franchise but my friend Isaac is. The cake itself is layers of thin sponge and lemon mousse. The cloud pattern is baked into a thin cake, like you might for a roll cake. The cloud patterned piece is laid around the interior circumference of a springform pan, then inside of that are alternating layers of sponge cake and lemon mousse. On top is an apricot jam glaze colored with food coloring. I’ve never made this kind of cake before. It was both surprisingly easy to do and quite delicious. For the figures, I wanted to try stained glass isomalt. The black lines are piped with royal icing and then I dabbed the melted isomalt in with a toothpick. It worked really well except that I think you are supposed to then put a layer of clear isomalt over the back to hold it all together. Since I didn’t do this, the royal icing joints were definite weak points. The figures are more or less just sitting on top of the cake, which looked great for a few minutes, right up until the royal icing began to dissolve in the glaze. I have had this problem before with royal icing and various other edible substances, but apparently I haven’t yet learned my lesson. Fortunately, everyone got to admire the cake before we had a Mr. Men structural failure and we ate it very shortly thereafter.