It’s a Pizza…It’s a Cake…It’s…It’s….

…well, can I say it’s BOTH? 🙂

THIS was what I busied myself with Friday morning, in preparation for my son’s school Winter Festival in the evening.

I had volunteered to donate a cake for the Cake Walk game during the festival and I could bring in any kind of cake I’d wanted, in any creative manner.

After some deliberation and discussion with my hubby, I decided to go with something simple yet unique that I had not done before:  a Pizza Cake.  Quite simply, it’s actually a cake, which is decorated to look like a pizza. 🙂

Here’s what I used:

• Pizza crust: Regular vanilla cake
• Pizza sauce: Buttercream icing, colored with red and brown gel food coloring, in a rough ratio of 4:1, to get that authentic red-brown tomato sauce color.
• Cheese: Shaved white chocolate, using either a cheese grater or a fruit peeler.  I didn’t have a cheese grater, so I used the peeler.
• Pepperoni: Fruit roll-ups, cut into circles using either a round cookie cutter or bottle top.
• Green peppers: Colored green fondant
• Olives: Cut and cored blueberries
• Minced beef: Shaved milk chocolate, using fruit peeler. On hindsight, I could also just used chocolate chips.

Decorating the cake was a whole lotta fun!

First I leveled the cake using a serrated knife, making sure there was some brown parts all around it, for the “pizza crust”.  Then I spread the icing all over the top of the cake.  It doesn’t have to be evenly spread, just make it look natural, like tomato sauce spread on top of a pizza.

Then I shaved the white chocolate all over the “pizza topping”.  I heated up the oven for a few minutes, and placed the cake with the “toppings and cheese” into the oven for about 3-4 minutes, until the “cheese” started to melt a little.  Then I took it out and placed it in the fridge to cool and set for about 30 minutes.

Next, I prepared the rest of the toppings, and arranged them on top of the “pizza cake”.

To make the cake look more pizza-like, I put it in a pizza box 🙂

My cake was actually one of the smallest cakes in the entire Cake Walk, I guess it’s also because the HUGE pizza box gave the illusion that the cake was tiny, so none of the Cake Walk winners chose my cake initially.

However, the icing on the cake was when the committee announced the most creative cake (voted by the committee, I suppose) was my pizza cake! :D:D

What joy!!!  And I even won a $25 Target gift card!! 😀

My hubby now wants to take credit for helping me decide to make the pizza cake in the first place… LOL 😛