to make this great, smoking volcano cake using your giant cupcake mold.

If you follow my channel, My Cupcake Addiction, you'll know that I love to show you how to

make not only giant cupcakes but heaps of different things using your giant cupcake

mold. I'm a big fan of many users for the one [pen].

So tools and equipment that we will be using today:

Mine's going to be for dinosaur party so I've actually made mine as part of a great, big,

dinosaur, volcano cupcake tower. So I've got some little plastic dinosaurs.

Now I've picked this up in a pack. They came with all of these trees and it's a really

common place at the children. In Australia, I bough mine in K-Mart for 15 dollars and

for 15 dollars I got, I think, 200 pieces, and more than I could ever use. So the birthday

boy is going to get a lot of extras when we're finished with this cake.

I've got myself a square cake board. I'll leave details of the size of this cake board.

And look, it's really going to depend on how many dinosaur and how much of a setting you

want to put around it. I've iced mine with a bit of green icing so some green fondant.

And I do have a whole tutorial on my channel that shows you how to ice and fondant a board.

So I will leave a link to that in the description box below. And I've just got mine on a little

cake decorating turntable today for ease. I've got my giant cupcake which has been baked.

We do have a whole series on how to get your giant cupcake or baked and out of its little

cupcake liner. I've used a mud cake today because I want a really heavy-duty cake for

this volcano. We're going to be coring out the center of it. if you use something like

a mud, it's quite a dense cake and it's going to hold its shape a lot better than if you

use, say, a sponge. I've got those on a cooling rack.

And I've got a couple of trays. Now this is just going to be the catcher of our mess today.

I've got a circular cookie-cutter. I've got some of our dark chocolate ganache.

And I've also got some white chocolate ganache. I will leave all of the ingredients for these

recipes in the description box below. We have a whole tutorial for the dark chocolate ganache.

For the white chocolate ganache, I've made the recipe as per the instructions below.

Then I've halfed it and I've colored half red and half orange. You can use any food

coloring you like. It can be liquid, paste, gel, powder. It really doesn't matter for

ganache. I've got a small serrated edge knife.

I've got a big serrated edge knife or a bread knife.

I've got just a smooth edge or a butter knife. I've got some scissors.

I've got a couple of zip lock bags. And for our smoke effect, I've got just a

little plastic shot glass. You can also use a little candle (Inaudible 02:32), or anything

glass, plastic, it doesn't matter. And I've got just a little new medicine dropper.

These are any about a dollar for us down at the local pharmacy.

You're also going to need a little bit of dried ice. Now, initially I thought, dried

ice: what a pain, where am I going to find it from? I got dry ice pellets for 8 dollars

a kilo, which is so much more than I am ever going to use. It lasts for a few days so long

as you keep it airtight. It doesn't need to be stored in the freezer, so long as it's

in an airtight container and it gives us that brilliant smoky effect.

So let's get started. Now the first thing that we want to do is

we want to carve up our giant cupcake. So you can see there's going to be quite a bit

of mess. We'll pull our rack out here and pop that off to the side. I want to try and

catch some of my mess so there's not as much cleaning for me to do as we get through this

tutorial. So you want to make sure that you've got a

nice, flat bottom on the base of your cupcake, you can see there as it's risen, [for] it's

drying on its face or cooling on its head, I guess. So it's flattened down quite a bit.

But you really want to cut it along, sort of along this line with the ripples because

you want that to be the base. So you might go just a touch underneath that. We'll have

a little bit of a ganache circle. So as I cut that, I'm actually going to turn

the cupcake around. That will give me a really nice, even cut. Fingers crossed. And look,

for your volcano, it doesn't matter if it's not a 100% even or a 100% level because it's

a volcano, it's a mountain so it's not technically supposed to be perfect. It going to be just

a little bit there that I need to trim off and there's my nice, flat base, ready to go.

Turn that over. You're looking at the bottom half of your volcano. We'll pop that just

down there. This is going to go with some of my leftover ganaches for dinosaur cakepops

to go with my extravagant dinosaur desert table for my son's birthday.

So you want your top here. Now you're going to take the top and I'm going to cut along.

So I'm holding it here but you'll notice I'm not actually at risk of cutting myself. I'm

just going to hold it because I'm holding underneath where the knife is going. And once

again, I'm turning. You'll see how beautifully the mud cake cuts in comparison to, say, a

sponge cake. Alright, so now you want to just position

that on top. And what you can see there is a little bit of overhang. So it's kind of

looking a little bit like a mushroom now. We want to trim that over hang off. But be

warned, this little bit overhang can be a little bit crumbly because it's quite firm

because of the different cooking spray and the cooking oil that we've used. So I like

to get my smallest serrated edge knife. The other thing we want to do is want to cut

off these little ridges that are common with giant cupcake cases. So to begin with, I'm

just going to run my knife around being really careful not to cut yourself there. So I'm

going to run my knife around and just smooth them out. It's just going to look a little

bit unusual if you've got a big volcano that's got kind of these perfect circular ridges

on the top. So you don't have to be perfect about getting them out. So once you've gone

around your first layer, just position it on top. So you've got there sort of nicely

sized. The only thing that I do want to do is just grade down that edge a little bit

because it's just looking a little bit like it kind of drops down a bit too neatly there.

So leaving that on top of that giant cupcake. I'll pop it back in my tray just so I can

once again store the mess. I'm just going to go around this like this, just by eye.

And just shave it down. Alright, now for our volcano, we want to take

the top off. So I'm just going to cut straight across the top. Have a look at your circle

cutter. And once again, this might change depending on how big you want your volcano,

I guess, hole to be. But I don't want to take too much off the top there because I do want

to try and retain a nice top to my volcano. So that's about the same size as my circle

cutter. You want to go a little bit bigger because you need that flat ridge to come out

about a centimeter all the way around your circle cutter. So I'm going to just go down

another centimeter and cut it again. You can see how many cakepops we're going to get out

of all these cut off. That is perfect. So this is going to be where out lava sits and

it's all going to come over the top of our volcano. We'll just do a little bit of tidy

up and we'll come back and we're ready to get decorating.

Alright, so we've cleaned up a lot of that mess. Now take your nice, neat top and make

sure that you sit it down. I'm just going to sit it behind me exactly in the same direction

because we've trimmed it pretty well perfectly the size. You don't want to be turning it

around here. Take your circle cookie cutter and right in

the middle there, push down. Leave it sticking out just about a millimeter so just a fraction,

fraction of an inch and give it a twist. Now this is the great thing again about mud cake,

as you twist it, you can actually see that cake is now twisting in that little core and

pull it out. You don't want to go all the way to the bottom of the cake. This is going

to be where our hidden lava is. So when I actually cut the cake, lava is going to flow

out of the center of the cake which is going to be visually spectacular. But you don't

want to cut all the way down to the bottom or your lava is going to seep out underneath

your giant cupcake. So you really need that cake there to catch it.

So now for the top cake, once again in the middle. You just want to push that cookie

cutter through and I'm going to push that all the way down because that's quite a thin

piece. Lift it up and push all the way through. So you can see there, I'm actually pushing

it all the way through. And then we'll push that cookie cutter out.

So take your knife, we're going to take a little bit of that chocolate ganache and just

moisten the top here with a little bit of ganache. That's just going to be a delicious

glue. And then we'll stick our volcano top back on. Perfect. Now we can see a volcano

starting. Now what you want to do here and it does get a little bit messy, hence the

tray and the cooling rack underneath, is we're just going to scoop this ganache on and just

cover the outside of this volcano. You could leave it raw like that. It still does look

very volcano-like. But you don't want to expose the cake to the air. It's going to dry out

really quickly. So this ganache is going to seal that cake and make sure that it's going

to last couple of days. So you don't have to be frantically making it on the morning

of your child's party. So you can see there I'm just going to use

my knife and I'm just going to start at the top and just, almost just let it fall down

or drizzle down. Don't worry too much about the rim of the volcano because that's going

to have our lava ganache in it anyway. And I'm just going to smooth it over until that

covers the whole thing. Alright, so you've got your volcano there and that ganache is

still really wet and quite sticky. So if you'd leave that for an hour or so that ganache

is going to start to firm up. And when you do actually serve this cake, it's not going

to be that wet and sticky. It's going to be quite firm. It will actually almost solidify

a little bit around the outside of that cake. So it's time now to apply our cake to our

board. So we want to take our cake board. You want to take just a little bit of chocolate

ganache and this is going to glue the cake to the board. Pop it in the center. And then,

using that knife, we're going to lift the cake off the try using the knife. You can

also use a pellet knife or [you might even] use a bread knife for this just because it's

a little bit longer. So I'm just going to slide it underneath the cake. Once again,

my cake, a lot more stable than if it was a sponge. And don't worry if you're moving

a little bit of that ganache around. I'm actually going to stabilize it by just putting my fingers

in the larva hole, transferring it. I'm going to take my other knife and I'm just going

to push that up against the cake as I pull this knife out. Beautiful. A seamless transfer.

So we're ready... We're getting to the point at the end of our volcano tutorial now. You

can see it's really starting to take shape. So what you want to do here is take your zip

lock bags and we're going to put some of our red and some of our orange ganache in each

one. So one's going to have red and one's going to have orange. Make sure that you let

any air out of that bag before you seal it up.

Alright, so from here, you can probably guess what we're going to do. We want to just cut

the corner off your zip lock bag. So just make sure that you're not doing it over the

cake. Just cut off a corner. It doesn't have to be particularly fine. So I'm going to cut

off quite a chunky corner there. Make sure you know where your little piece of plastic

has gone and pick it up as soon as you can. You don't want to risk that plastic going

into one of the cakes that you're making or any part of the cake you're making, especially

not when it's a kid's cake, actually when it's anyone's cake.

Same again with the orange. Alright, now for the lava, I like to hold

them both together and spin as I'm going. And then turn them around. Beautiful. Once

you get to about that full, SO about 2/3 of the way full, take your toothpick. And remember

we want this to be visually spectacular when we cut it. Take your toothpick and just give

it a little, kind of a little stir. But don't stir it too much than you combine the 2 colors.