And this is my finished product;
So a quick and dirty how to. I made two very moist chocolate cakes (vegan - a recipe to follow shortly) in a 21cm spring-form cake tin and left them overnight to cool in the fridge. I also made the pigs ahead of time. When I say "I", I actually mean "we" because Kat is just better at modelling than me. It's not that I can't make cute little piggy bottoms with sweet little tails attached - it's more that it would take three hours and seven individual tantrums whereas Kat can do it in like ten minutes. Bitch.
A hot tip I got from a website somewhere is to tint the icing not just with pink but with a tiny amount of ivory/flesh/apricot colour as this makes a much nicer pink pig skin colour instead of a lurid pink. It works. You need four trotters, three piggy bottoms and two piggy torsos - one with arms and one without. For the trotters -just roll four balls slightly bigger than a pea and press a bamboo skewer across the middle to make the "cleat". Pea-sized balls pricked with a skewer work for the snout. The bottoms are just balls, again with a bamboo skewer pressed to make the "cleavage" of the bottom. The tails are tiny sausages of icing curled around the bamboo skewer. Belly buttons and eyes are, again, just holes made with the bamboo skewer. The arms on the pig reclining against the edge of the tub are one tube, about ten centimetres long, cut in half and with a snip in each end to form the "cleat". Then they were left overnight to air dry. I highly recommend either making spare parts or keeping some icing wrapped in cling wrap in the fridge in case you need more. Placing the parts in the mud can be challenging and pink piggy parts smeared with mud just don't cut it.
The day after making the cakes and the pigs I took the cakes, cut them in half and layered them with vegan buttercream. I checked the height of the Kit Kats and found that I only needed three of the four halves to make the cake high enough (you need about an inch between the top of the cake and the top of the Kit Kats). After stacking them with buttercream between the layers I coated the sides of the cake with more buttercream to make the Kit Kats stick.
A word on Kit Kats. They're not cheap and for this size tin you need eleven. I got them half price so it wasn't too $$$. I have seen other stuff used but I liked the hot tub look the Kit Kats give. So yeah. 21cm cake tin? Eleven Kit Kats.
Insider tip? Break them in half while they're in their packets - it makes them split easily without shattering. Then start putting them around the edge of the cake so there are no gaps. Finish it off with a pretty bow (I went with pink organza) which not only serves as decoration but keeps the Kit Kats in place while you pour in the "mud".
Okay it's mud time! I went with a 2:1 chocolate to cream ratio. 200g chocolate and 100ml of cream makes a very firm ganache when it sets and it won't run or leak on you. Heat the cream and chocolate together in the microwave, taking it out at frequent intervals to stir so it doesn't burn. Pour into your hot tub and then smooth the top.
And the final part is to place your piggies. I personally recommend using tweezers to place your trotters or you can make like Kat and go through a few replacements while muttering "shut up, shut up, shut up" and making a concerted effort to ignore the tweezers your bud is wordlessly holding out for you. Your call.
The pigs were a massive hit. The man I made them for used to work in an office called "The Swamp" so it was the perfect theme. For a few hours they lived a condensed version of the celebrity lifestyle with all the trappings of fickle fame. Famous, gossiped about, photographed...and then their adoring public turned on them and consumed them in a vicious flurry. Unfortunately I had to leave the party early...this is what greeted me when I returned;
I'd say it tasted as good as it looked!
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