This is a little present I cooked up (literally) for Amy’s birthday. It’s a passable rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System done in the medium of sponge cake and icing.

The cake mix is a fairly standard combination of eggs, flour, sugar and butter/margarine. Google is full of cake recipes, go wild. Bake it at 200c until cooked and then leave to cool on a rack. Since I only had round cake tins I had to chop the cakes to shape resulting in a slightly square looking Nintendo. I was tempted to turn it into a Game Cube cake but didn’t have enough cake to do a cube.

The cake consists of two layers of sponge with a layer of buttercream in the middle (combine butter and sugar together, resist eating it). The outsides being coated in buttercream to help the icing stick.

The icing is the premade ready-to-roll variety, a favourite of lazy and busy cooks all over. Deciding to throw past Christmas cake icing experience out the window I opted to ice each side separately rather than draping one large piece of icing over the whole cake and smoothing it down. You can’t see the joins because I used a wet knife to smooth the whole thing.

The distinctive NES patterns and detail were first marked using a sharp knife and then coloured using food colouring and a clean paintbrush; the knife marks helping to prevent the colouring from bleeding into surrounding cake. I was skeptical how well painting icing would work out, but the results ended up much better than I thought. The stripes on the top were done using black decorative ‘writing’ icing in a tube, as were the Nintendo logo on the front and the power LED. The buttons are two pieces of icing.

Early games consoles such as the NES are good candidates for geeky cakes. They’re just squares or rectangles without too many complicated details. If you can bake and have limited art skills this kind of thing is easily accomplished in an afternoon.

I wasn’t aiming to create an accurate rendition of a Nintendo Entertainment System, just something that looked like one. All the non-geeks at the party asked what the weird stripy cake was all about, while everyone else thought it quite amusing.

Tips

• Use plenty of icing sugar to prevent the icing from sticking to your hands, rolling pin and chopping board
• Clean, sharp knives cut icing with clean, sharp lines
• Icing becomes surprisingly pliable when slightly warm and smoothing out bumps and weird parts is easy if the area is given a light but fast rub until the surface feels smooth
• If you get food colouring splats on the wrong parts of the cake, pick them off with a knife and smooth over the resulting hole
• Do not eat too much of the icing, you will feel ill after approximately a golf-ball’s worth and positively awful (but very hyperactive) after a fist-sized glob
• It’s a cake, don’t expect sharp corners or fine detail
• Do not tell the recipient about the little mistakes you’ve noticed because you’ve been staring at the cake for three hours, they won’t notice nor will they care. If it looks OK and tastes good the operation is a success
• Cookery is like hacking or programming, approach it in the same way