Marzipan Moose Cake

Marzipan Moose Cake

Happy 150th birthday Canada! I made an easy marzipan moose cake to celebrate :) Also, tips on how to make store-bought cake mix more dense for easy decorating.

It’s Canada Day! This year is especially awesome because it’s Canada’s 150th birthday. Before we left on our Canadian adventure, I made a little vanilla cake, complete with maple vanilla frosting and a marzipan maple leaf moose that looks just like the Canadian flag.

I was so happy to finally figure out an easy-ish way to make the Canadian flag in food form. I’ve done American flag jello (which is very easy, but time consuming), but I’ve never quite figured out a way to make the Canadian flag easily – although I like to think I succeeded by making a salmon and mashed potato flag last year! But, this year, instead of going savory, I wanted to do sweet because it’s one thing to make a salmon maple leaf for dinner, but it’s a little more difficult to gift people platters of lukewarm salmon. You never know if people are going to be into salmon, but cake? Now there’s a winner!

When I started out, I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to decorate the cake, but in the end I found a little maple leaf cookie cutter and thought of making a Canadian moose flag, inspired by Molly’s American cow flag. It’s a good thing I didn’t have to cut out an 11 point maple leaf otherwise this cake wouldn’t have been so cute.  The cookie cutter ended up being a little more squished and not as sharp as the real deal, but I think he’s cute and round and perfect for a little Canadian pride.

Side note: back in the day, when I decided that I wanted to be a baker, I sold a bunch of Olympic 2010 themed cookies where I free styled Canadian flags with royal icing. It was surprisingly difficult to pipe out those maple leaves – I constantly had to refer to a picture. Mike on the other hand, can essentially draw a maple leaf blindfolded.

Anyway, I didn’t have much time to whip up this cake, so naturally, I went with cake mix. Only thing is, I wanted the cake to have a denser crumb, to make it easier to frost. I did a quick little google search and the internet told me to put in an extra egg and a packet of pudding so that’s what I did and it worked! It wasn’t as dense as a homemade cake, but it did the job. I popped the cake in the freezer before icing to firm it up a bit, which helped a lot. I jazzed up canned frosting with a bit of extra powdered sugar and maple syrup to make it slightly less canned frosting-y.

The moose was the easiest thing to make: I kneaded a bit of red gel food coloring into marzipan (that we bought at Ikea) and rolled it out. From there, it was simply a question of cutting out shapes. Super easy and super cute.

Happy Canada Day Friends! Hope you’re celebrating :)
bbq, fireworks, and ALL the maple syrup things,