spiderman birthday cake

To celebrate my son Matthew's 5th birthday, I made him a Spiderman birthday cake to go along with the Spiderman cookies that I made as favors.  And as described in last year's Superman birthday cake post, my son seems to only like vanilla cake filled with whipped cream and fresh strawberries!  So I decided to make the same cake.  Except this time, I wanted to try a different vanilla cake recipe and chose a vanilla cake from the book "Baking: From My Home to Yours" by Dorie Greenspan.

Since the recipe makes two 9-inch cake layers but I wanted to make a 10-inch cake, I increased the recipe to 1.5 times to allow for the extra batter I would need.

Once the cakes had baked and cooled, I used a serrated knife to level them off, and then whipped up a batch of cream cheese buttercream, and a batch of freshly whipped cream.  I colored the majority of the frosting bright blue, and then piped a ring of it around the perimeter of the cake before filling it with the whipped cream.  This was to act as sort of a border, so that the whipped cream filling wouldn't ooze out the sides of the cake.

Next I added a layer of sliced fresh strawberries, and then covered it with another layer of whipped cream.

Then I placed the second layer of cake on top, and then did a quick crumb coat with the blue frosting.  I chilled the entire cake in the fridge for 30 minutes, and then applied a second coat of frosting.

Then came the fun part - piping Spiderman's face on the top of the cake!  I started by piping a black outline of the shape of his face, followed by a black outline of his eyes, and the signature black web on his face.  Then I filled in the eyes with white frosting using a star tip, and the rest of his face with red frosting and a star tip.

Then to finish off the cake, I wanted to pipe a spiderweb over the entire cake as a background to Spidey's face.  So I piped long black lines extending from Spidey's face, over the sides of the cake, and ending with a small black blob on the cake board.

And then I connected the web with curved black lines.

By the time I finished the cake, it was late at night, so I boxed it up and put it in the fridge until the big reveal.  I couldn't wait to see the look on Matthew's face!

As soon as I brought out the cake at the party, all the kids ran up and crowded around the cake table.

And my friend Helen got an awesome picture of Matthew blowing out the candles!

Happy Birthday, my Matthew!  We love you!!!

*** Update:
I ended up making this cake again, two years later, for my coworker's son's birthday. But this time it was a chocolate cake filled with chocolate mousse. I was able to take some better photos this time around, so here they are! :)