Lady Gaga Cake

"How the heck am I going to make a Lady Gaga cake?!"

That's what I've been saying to myself the past month, stressing and brainstorming. Still riding high on the success of the Fish Tank Birthday Cake I made for A, I decided to make a Lady Gaga birthday cake for my best friend Asian Gaga. Of course I knew I was dooming myself to a month of freaking out and several days of messy, angry disasters in the kitchen, but I knew she would love it. This was proven by the fact that not long after I decided to make it, she said to me, "Can you make me a Gaga cake for my birthday that says "Free bitch baby" on it please?", to which I replied, "You loser! You just totally ruined your birthday surprise!".

So here was the end result. It's not my best effort, I have to say. I'm still far, far away from mastering the art of cake decorating with buttercream. And somehow her chin got REALLY pointy after I iced it, so her head is a little more alien-like than I would prefer. But you can still tell it's meant to be Gaga, right? It took a while to decide what the cake would be like, considering the squillions of different looks of Lady Gaga that I could have taken inspiration for. I was really close to doing the cigarette glasses, but I couldn't come up with a really good way of making the candy cigarettes. So I decided to keep it simple, aiming this look from the 'Telephone' video:

Image courtesy of a screenshot from this video

Obviously, I added a little bit of embellishment on the Chanel glasses, because they looked a little plain on the cake when it was just all black on the front. And yes, the face isn't quite as smooth as I would have liked it, and the colours bled a little into each other. But how cool is the hair?!

Yes, I really did go buy some Diet Coke just so I could wash one out and stick it on the top of this cake. And I even bought a special piping tip (Wilton multi-opening top #233) which could make my icing look like hair. It was SO much fun piping out the lemon buttercream icing for her blonde hair, and I loved the effect I got from the piping tip. For me, that was the most successful element of the cake.

The rest of it was okay I guess, the phone was a last minute addition because I needed somewhere to pipe the words that Asian Gaga had requested (which are lyrics from Bad Romance), but it's quite fun, especially after I piped the black telephone cord down the bottom. Unfortunately I ran of out silver sprinkles while I was decorating it so it was a little patchy. The skin coloured icing was a total bitch to smooth out, I eventually gave up.

The cake is a passionfruit butter cake, with vanilla icing except for the hair which is lemon flavoured. Asian Gaga absolutely loved it, which was the most important thing. My main hope was that the cake wouldn't be so horribly ugly that it ended up on Cake Wrecks, and while it's not particularly neat and a little weird shaped, I'm hoping it's still decent enough that you can tell it's Gaga :)

Lady Gaga Birthday Cake
(Adapted from Le Cordon Bleu's Complete Cooking Step-by-Step basic yellow cake recipe)
For the cake:
355g plain flour
1 tbsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
225 ml milk
1 tsp pure vanilla extract
400g caster sugar
224g unsalted butter, softened
4 medium eggs
(I replaced 25ml milk with the pulp from 3 passionfruit)

For the buttercream icing:
125g butter
3 cups icing sugar, sifted
milk + vanilla extract, or lemon to taste

Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease one 20cm round cake tin and one small loaf tin and line the base with baking paper. Grease the paper and dust tins with flour. Combine flour, baking powder and salt in medium bowl, set aside. Mix milk and vanilla together in measuring jug.

Beat sugar and butter in large bowl until creamy, add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. With mixer on medium-low speed, alternatively add flour mixture and milk mixture, beginning and ending with flour mixture, beating until smooth, occasionalluy scraping bowl with a spatula. (At this point I folded in the passionfruit pulp) Pour approximately 2/3 of the mixture into the round tin and the remaining mixture in the loaf tin and bake until golden and a skewer inserted into the centre comes out almost clean with a few moist crumbs attached. This took about 30 minutes for the loaf and 40 minutes for the round tin. Remove from oven and cool for 10 minutes, then carefully run a butter knife around the edges and turn out on to a wire rack to cool completely.

Whe cakes are completely cooled, carve out the face shape from the round cake. You can leave some rectangular bits sticking out of each side so you know where your Gaga glasses will be (but I ended up cutting a lot of this away when I actually iced it). Remember that the final size of the cake will be slightly larger after you ice it.

Cut out a telephone shape using the cake baked in the loaf tin, making sure it is the right size to fit next to the face cake. Keep one of the cake cut offs, just a little piece to use as the nose for the face.

Remove butter from the fridge 20 minutes before you are ready to prepare the butter icing. Chop into small pieces and beat in a large mixing bowl on high speed until it is light and fluffy. Add icing sugar and beat until combined. At this point add the vanilla and milk or the lemon juice to taste, and finally beat in the desired colouring. To get the skin coloured icing I used a tiny smidge of pink with a few drops of yellow, yellow for the hair and black for the glasses. First, ice the face, smoothing out with a palette knife, leaving room for icing the glasses on.

Carefully apply black icing for the glasses and red icing for the lips, trying not to smudge any of the colours into the skin coloured area.

Use a multi-opening piping tip to pipe the 'blonde hair' icing around a Diet Coke can, or maybe a ziploc back with several holes poked into a bottom corner. Alternatively you could pipe the icing on smoothly and then create the hair effect by scraping a knife or skewer through the icing before it sets.

I covered the telephone in a thin layer of slightly runnier icing and then dipped it into the silver sprinkles. The writing and telephone cord were piped on using leftover black icing from the glasses, and then silver and pink cachous for decorating the glasses. Et voilà, my attempt at a Lady Gaga cake :)

Happy 24th Birthday Asian Gaga!