My daughter wanted a jewelry box cake for her 4th birthday. I got some ideas for designing jewelry with sweets from various sources such as this web site, and improvised with the ones that are available in South Africa. Most of the web recipe advice suggested Graham crackers – we don’t get them in our country and I wouldn’t know what to substitute them with.
I resorted to baking 2 cakes: basic chocolate (the recipe I have for chocolate cake is more moist than the vanilla – nobody likes a dry cake). I baked one in a loaf tin, the other in a standard rectangular tin. After some reshaping, the rectangular cake was pinned to the loaf shape using kebab sticks (removed later when icing was sufficiently hardened).
I used stiff moulding icing to cover the back (lid), drawers and fairy stand (used cake cut out to form indents on top) and line the indents I cut out, then I iced on top of it (in some cases) and around with an icing made with melted pink cooking chocolate, some butter and icing sugar.
The rest was decorations, and I used the remainder of the sweets to fill the cake tray – adults and kids alike enjoyed the jelly sweets. I tried to stick to the theme of pink, white and purple on the cake, but threw in all the colour around it.
Sweets used included: smarties; all sorts; jelly beans; almond candies; sour jellies; jelly tots.
I left it to set overnight using added support to ensure the lid wouldn’t fall.
It held up well and was most enjoyed!
Dear Bronwyn. I’m also from SA, so your cake looked a lot more familiar with sweets I know I’ll be able to find in our shops! However I cannot quite see how you got to the gorgeous end result. Could you please send me another picture so I can make out the detail?
Kind regards
Nita Kemp