Fairy Tail Fantasia Cake

It's not every day when you get to combine a bunch of your interests into one project. Yesterday was one of those days. 

My husband, Alex, is a huge fan of the anime Fairy Tail and he loves strawberry shortcake. We had a birthday lunch for him this weekend and I had a great idea for the cake:

For those who don't follow the anime, one of the characters, Erza, purchases this cake as a gift for a new member (and a few for herself if I remember correctly...)

So I set out to learn how to make this cake (or something relatively similar).

First, I searched for a recipe to make Japanese strawberry shortcake. I went with this recipe from La Fuji Mama but doubled the whole thing (I only had large pans and therefore the cake was too thin to cut in half... so I made a second and used each as the layer for a MASSIVE cake).

Next I had to figure out how to do the Fairy Tail symbol on top. I've seen replicas of this cake where it was piped directly onto the whipped cream frosting, but to me, it looks more like a white chocolate placard placed on top of the cake. So that's what I did.

I drew the symbol on a piece of paper, then placed wax paper over top and traced it with a marker. I flipped the wax paper over (marker side down, so that the symbol was backwards) and used a paintbrush to paint melted dark chocolate inside the lines. 

After it cooled completely, I melted some white chocolate and let it cool a bit. I placed a 4 inch round cookie cutter (which I greased with shortening) around the symbol and poured the white chocolate gently over it. I leveled it out with a knife and let it cool. 

Because I am impatient, I tried to lift the cutter WAY too early and smudged my symbol. As you can see. 

I corrected this as best I could with a paint brush and some white and dark chocolate, which you'll see in the finished pictures. I then used a tube of store bought pink frosting to add Happy the cat to the placard as best I could (I'm no artist).

From here, I put the cake together, using whole strawberries in the middle and frosting only the top and middle. I used a large star frosting tip to do a border and some decorations on the top and an ordinary round tip to pipe some whipped cream around the chocolate placard. My strawberries were massive, and so I didn't fit too many on top. Here is the finished product. Please forgive my low quality pictures and poor photography skills... I am not a food blogger and do not have a good camera at this point. (Also... yes... I need to change my tablecloth... I am aware it is no longer Christmas :P).

Anyway, there it is. In future I would cut off the edges of the cake to reveal the neater, light coloured inside of the sponge cake... but not half bad for my first attempt I think. 

La Fuji Mama's recipe tasted great and it went over well with the family... as you can see:

This was an incredibly fun project and I'd love to do more geeky baking/cooking in the future. If anyone has any suggestions or would like me to find a way to replicate (or make an original recipe in tribute of) a show, movie, book etc... let me know. Cooking or baking... as long as I know the content or can easily look into it... I'll probably be interested. 

So Happy Birthday Alex <3 and to everyone affected by last night's snowstorm... stay safe and warm!