Retro TV Birthday Cake

I’ve done a few birthday cakes but this has to be the most special to date. My brother wanted something special for his girlfriend so I thought it would be fun to make a birthday cake for her instead of getting one from the bakery. Together with my sister who is also known as Naughty Girl (the childhood nickname stuck), we brainstormed a bit and discarded a few ideas that were too silly or over the top or in his opinion, lame.

In the end we came up with the idea of the retro TV cake and as she is very fond of the TV (there’s a in joke about this) and it would work. The cake was a layered chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream filling.

My sister and I decided to go with a bright orange colour. It was almost fluorescent at one point but we were going for Cyndi Lauper’s hair colour circa ‘She Bop’. I think we got it. We had to think a bit about what to use to create the frame for the screen, the dials and the speakers. We agreed right out that the antenna’s could be made with Pocky Sticks aka Rocky. These were very easy to find. We thought of icing the border in chocolate buttercream but decided on using choc chips as it gave it more texture both from a visual perspective and also when you bit into it.


For the dials, we used a Japanese brand of marshmallows with a chocolate filing which we covered in chocolate. To let them dry without the chocolate sticking to anything, we inserted a skewer into the side and stuck them in a flowerpot. The plant never looked better!


For the speakers, we just used square wafers which were easy to find. After I iced the cake, Naughty Girl painstakingly put the choc chips in one by one to create the frame for the screen. At this point it was starting to look like a TV. After we decided that we were only going to need 1 dial, we gobbled down the other two chocolate covered marshmallows and made a few more with the remaining marshmallows. Isn’t decorating fun?? You get to trial and sample! ^_^

She loved the cake, so now there is one more person to taste test my experiments in the kitchen!