Crazy Peeps Easter Cake

Happy Easter! Although many of you may not celebrate the holiday, this post is about something people of all faiths can enjoy: Marshmallow Peeps. I made the above cake, which I have entitled “Crazy Peeps Cake,” with Martha Stewart’s homemade peeps recipe- instead of piping the birds onto sanding sugar to be eaten seperately, I just piped them directly on to a frosted layer cake, sanding sugar on top. I kind of made this for fun, but I am so pleased with the slightly insane looking results I’ll probably serve it at our Easter lunch tomorrow! Won’t my guests be impressed/frightened when I tell them I applied each little eye to my flock myself with tweezers!

Read on for the recipe/instructions

1. Prepare yellow sponge cake recipe of your choice (two rounds). Let cool completely.
2. Make a large batch of buttercream frosting: cream 1 cup butter until super fluffy, and add about 7 cups of confectioner’s sugar and dribbles of whole milk (about 1/4 cup) alternately until it looks like frosting, and add about 1/4 tsp of salt towards the beginning and 1 tsp vanilla towards the end (about 10 minutes total). You should do this in a stand mixer but if you don’t have one just beat it by hand and put some muscle into it.
3. Scalp each cake layer so it is flat (with a serrated knife), stack them, and frost as normal, generously (you can add some jam to the inside layer too if you want).
4. Prepare Martha Stewart’s “Marshmallow for Piping” recipe. Warning: this recipe involves a candy thermometer.
5. Here is where you might want to start drinking. Scoop some of the marshmallow mixture into a pastry bag, or a ziplock bag with a little snip cut in one corner ( I used a ziplock and it was fine). Practice making your little birds on some wax paper before you get near the cake. The marshmallow mixture hardens up pretty quickly and doesn’t pipe well once it is stiff- you can remedy this by microwaving it a little, but then it often it gets too warm to hold its shape. If you practice a little you’ll get a feel for when it is the right consistency. This all sounds very scary but it is pretty flexible so you can just keep experimenting.
6. Once you have gained mastery of the marshmallow, pipe the birds on to the cake in a decorative manner. Imagine they are all in a synchronized swimming troupe.
7. Add eyeballs. Mine are all the blue, purple, and green round sprinkles from a multicolored jar, but you could also buy one of those little frosting sqeeze tubes and pipe some dots on.
8. Dust the entire thing with colored sugar.

Filed under BourgeoisAbode, CountryMouse's Old House |
Posted by: CountryMouse