I made modeling chocolate (and a trampoline cake)

As you probably surmised, we had a birthday last week.  Our middlest child turned double digits.  He chose to celebrate by taking a couple of his buddies to a magical building filled with wall-to-wall trampolines.  You can literally bounce off the walls at this place.  We love it.  LOVE it.  And yes, there is a foam pit.

 Blurry.  'Cause he's bouncing.

Due to the nature of his celebration, MC wanted a trampoline cake.  Go ahead and google it--pretty much all of the trampoline cakes out there in cyberspace use fondant.  And look like round back-yard trampolines.

That would not do.  Not at all.  Not gonna do fondant.  And we needed ours to look like the wall-to-wall trampoline place.

So I made modeling chocolate.  Modeling chocolate is playdough made out of chocolate (or in my case, orange candy melts).  Anything you can do with polymer clay, you can do with modeling chocolate.  It is super easy to work with, tastes good, and requires just two ingredients.  Modeling chocolate has opened up a whole new world of possibilities for me as a cake artist.

I baked a 9x13 cake and left it in the pan to support the "walls".  I frosted the cake with chocolate frosting--for a more authentic look, use buttercream tinted black, allow to set, then use a clean basketball or a piece of window screen to add texture.  Next, I frosted graham crackers and placed them on the cake along the edges for walls.  Hint--you can use a serrated knife to cut graham crackers into triangles for the corners.  Pipe more frosting to fill in any gaps, then smooth seams with a wet finger.

Next, I rolled out my orange modeling chocolate and cut it into strips using a table knife.  Then I placed the strips on the cake in the wall-to-wall trampoline grid shape.  I found some silhouette jumper clipart and printed it out on cardstock.  Then I found some pics of the boys who were celebrating with us, printed them out and stuck their heads to the clipart jumpers, attaching them to popsicle sticks.  And yes, the heads are big like that on purpose.

The boys got a kick out of the fact that they were jumping on the cake (even though Thing 2's hand started smoldering)--they all wanted a piece from "their" section of the trampoline--and MC loved it.

Happy modeling chocolate and trampoline cake making!