Boo! It's a name cake!

So we are almost through the list of sweet treat crazes of 2013, but I have been saving this particular sweet treat craze for a special little nephew of mine for his birthday. I am of course referring to the Peekaboo cake craze that is sweeping social media this year. Whether you've seen it done on the Great Australian Bake Off with their checker board cake challenge or seen the images a plenty on line of cakes sporting polka dots, rainbow swirls and even love hearts, we've all questioned "well how one earth do they do that?". So we thought we would show you! But given the abundance of tutorials on line on how to bake polka dots into your cakes we decided to take it to the next level and try something you hadn't seen before (we have actually only seen this done once before albeit unsuccessfully), a name cake. Yes that's right, cut the cake open to reveal the name of your loved one or maybe some special words. Now this will really only work for short names/words, unless you find some very small letter cutters, but you may lose the effect. And of course this can be done with any sort of image cutters, it doesn't have to be letters, so let your imagination run wild.

  

Step 1.

Bake your cakes for the letters inside the cake (get the recipe for our butter cake here). We baked 3 square butter cakes coloured with red food gel (one cake per letter to spell 'MAX').

Step 2.

Once your cakes are completely cooled, trim the tops of your cakes with a serrated knife to ensure a flat surface to work with.

Step 3.

Using letter cutters, cut your letters out and set aside. We got four of each letter out of each cake.

Step 4.

Prepare your cake batter for the rest of the cake. You can use the same butter cake recipe here.

Step 5.

Place a small amount of batter in the base of your tin and smooth over. Align your first row of letters set at least 2cm back from the front of the cake tin.Stack the remaining letters behind without any gaps.

Step 6.

Using a piping bag, pipe your cake batter in an around your letters, filling the tin. Use a spatula to smooth over the top of the cake.

Step 7.

Bake cake as per the recipe and allow to cool.

Step 8.

Once completely cooled, trim the cake sides and top using a serrated knife to ensure a perfectly sized cake with the lettering centered.

Step 9.

Decorate as desired. We covered our cake in butter cream with fondant cut letters to match the inside of the cake. Get our butter cream recipe here.