Every Moving Crew Needs Fuel

So I had several friends move this month (enough that I suggested we rent a party bus and do a housewarming-crawl.) Of course with moving comes moving food: Pizza and beer. I decided to make a cake at the last minute so I didn't have a chance to make a beer cake as well.

This cake was a pretty simple concept. Basically I just made a big round cake and iced it with pizza-crust colored icing. Getting the colour was probably one of the hardest parts. I've tried to make this colour before using cocoa powder but even when I sifted it it still ended up with brown spots. This time I decided to get creative with my Wilton gel food colourings. I make this colour using a mix of brown, copper (light skin tone) and golden yellow.

Now for the fun part: The toppings!

I made this cake on Good Friday, and my local cake supply store was closed. That left me to scour the bulk aisle at the grocery store. The pineapples are made of little yellow sour gumdrops that I scooped one by one out of the bin. the dried cranberries I thought looked like sundried tomatoes. The "pepperoni" is made from Sun Ripe fruit snacks that I cut out using the round end of a large icing tip since I didn't have a round cookie cutter. My brother-in-law and I ate the scraps because they are made from 100% fruit and full of vitamins, so we didn't want them to go to waste. The grocery store didn't have any chocolate covered raisins or anything similar, so I used two bamboo skewers to hand-dip Rice Krispies in melted chocolate to make it look like ground beef. For the sauce, I used some cheap strawberry jam (cheap because it had fewer chunks of real fruit than the name brands did so it spread more easily) and I mixed it with a bit of the leftover icing to make it a little more opaque. The mozzarella cheese is made from homemade modelling chocolate grated with a cheese grater.

And there you have it! Pop it in a pizza box (preferably a clean one) and you have your moving-day cake!