The Hedgehog Birthday Cake (siili kakku)

This is my youngest's birthday cake, he loves hedgehogs of all types, in the past we have made hedgehog cakes, cupcakes, piñatas, jack-o-lanterns, and even a pinewood derby car.  I had planned to make a cake decorated with strawberries and cream, but he was home sick today and I didn't get a chance to go shopping for fresh fruit.

For the cake base, I used a Finnish recipe from Parhaat Leivonaiset.  The ingredients were:

5 eggs

1 cup sugar (2 1/2 dl)

2 teaspoons vanilla sugar or vanilla

1/2 cup flour (1.25 dl)

1/2 cup potato or corn starch (1.25 dl)

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

Preheat the oven to 300 F (150 C).

First, I whipped the eggs and sugar until frothy with my stand mixer, they looked like this:

In another bowl, I mixed the dry ingredients.  I bought vanilla sugar this weekend at Ikea, so I mixed it with the dry ingredients.  If you use liquid vanilla, mix it with the eggs.

Carefully fold the dry mixture into the egg mixture.

To make a hedgehog shape, I greased and floured a large oven-safe Pyrex mixing bowl and filled it with the batter.

I baked the cake on the bottom rack of the oven for about 50 minutes.

The recipe I used baked the cake in two cake pans, at 350 F (175 C) for 30 minutes.  I lowered the temperature and lengthened the time so that I could get the cake done in the middle.  We've had a lot of practice baking in this bowl to make Barbie cakes for my daughter!

The middle sank in a bit right at the end of baking, but not enough to hurt.    

To get the cake out, I ran a knife around the edge and inverted it on a rack. 

After it cooled a bit, I sliced it in two layers in order to put in a bit of strawberry jelly (hedgehog blood?).  I drizzled the juice from a can of pineapple on both halves first to moisten the cake.

It was easy to push the bottom layer into a hedgehog head shape as I put the cake back together.

Melted chocolate was a good hedgehog-looking coating for the cake.

We had a huge bag of thin pretzels, it didn't take long to put in the spikes while the chocolate was still warm.  The plate got a bit messy from the melted chocolate, so I added a border of marzipan candy fruit.  The eyes are sugar babies (caramel candy) and the nose is half of a Dajm toffee candy.  

Next time I need to coat a cake with chocolate, I think I will try to keep the cake on a rack and let the extra chocolate drip off before putting it on the serving platter.  But wouldn't all this fruit make a great snack for Hedgie?