Ladybug Gateau with striped case and raspberry cream

I made this gateau for a colleague who celebrated her going-away party and had her invitations decorated with ladybugs. As I wanted to test my idea to make the black parts with dark berries and the red ones with red berries first, I made a small gateau first. I multiplied the ingredients wit 1.5 to get a 26cm and a 18 cm gateau.

Serves 12:

For the case:

4 eggs

2 TBSP hot water

125 g sugar

125 g flour

20g cocoa

For the cream:

300 g raspberries

1 TBSP lemon juice

70 g sugar

6 sheets of gelatin

400 g cold whipping cream 

Decoration:

100 g red berries (raspberries, red currant)

100 g black berries (black berries, black currant)

2 TBSP sugar

3 Blatt Gelatine

2 Toffifee 

1 chocolate stick

50 g whipping cream

1 TS sugar

Tools:

pastry bag 

tinfoil or a strip of silicone

Zubereitung:

Preheat oven to 180°C, line a 26cm baking tin with baking paper. For the two dark and light doughs, beat halve the eggs, water and sugar in separate bowls until white, add the flour to both bowls and the cocoa to one of the bowls, carefully mix flour under the dough.

Put the light and the dark dough into a pastry bag each and pipe alternating stripes into the baking tin. Bake on the second level from below for 15-30 minutes, let the case cool on a cooling rack.
Get the case out of the tin, remove baking paper, put the case on a cake plate and fix the baking tin rim around it.
Put the gelatin in cold water for 5 minutes, unfreeze the raspberries, puree them with lemon juice and sugar. Heat the gelatin with a little water until fluid, mix in a spoonful of raspberry puree, mix with the rest of the raspberries.
Whip the cream and carefully mix it with the raspberry mass. Fill the cream onto the case, smooth out and put in a cool place to let it grow solid.

For the ladybug decoration, lay out the face in the cream with a tooth pick. Separate the body from the head using the tinfoil strip - I used the silicone strip - by sticking it into the cream like a little wall.

Put 1,5 sheets of gelatin in cold water and heat it slowly until fluid. Puree the red berries with 1 TBSL sugar and add 1,5 sheets of fluid gelatin, pour onto the ladybug body.  Puree the black berries likewise with sugar and gelatin and fill into a pastry bag. Pipe the dots onto the body and fill the head area.

Remove the tinfoil carefully. 

Use a knife to loosen the cream mass from the rim and remove the ring carefully.

Cut out a little piece from the cake (in between the wings). This piece serves perfectly to get a taste of your hard work's effect already...
The striped casing also shows off better like this.















Use a knife to carve the bug between body and head and between the wings. Decorate the ladybug with Toffifee for eyes and the (broken in two pieces) chocolate stick for antennae, whip the cream and pipe a smiling mouth and eyebrows/lashes.
Keep this decoration until the last minute, as the cream tends to get red and the outer part of the Toffifee contains sugar and therefore melts in the gelatin mass. That's why this first test ladybug as these mean, red-rimmed eyes. ;-)

That's also why I added the eyes and antennae only just before serving the cake and therefore ended up forgetting to take a picture of the finished gateau.
However, I think it's cute like this, too.

Ladybugs also need their beauty sleep... ;-)