Jonny Manganello makes a wedding cake using an Easy-Bake Oven.Photo:JonnyCakes/YouTube
JonnyCakes/YouTube
As a hyper-realistic cake artist, Jonny Manganello has baked a lot of cakes. But baking a wedding cake inside of an Easy-Bake Oven was a first.
The former contestant of Netflix’sIs It Cake?shared the “fun challenge” of making a two-tiered, six-layer wedding cake using the children’s electric oven playset onTikTokandInstagram, with a full-length tutorial onYouTube.
“Sort of ironically, I hate making wedding cakes,” Manganello tells PEOPLE. “When I first started making cakes I did a couple weddings and the pressure is so intense. I don’t want to mess up a cake for anybody’s big day. There’s just this feeling around wedding cakes that scares me, so I wanted to challenge myself to do something that I’m not super comfortable doing.”
He continues, “I make more designed, sculpted cakes, so wedding cakes are a bit out of my area of expertise. So, A) That was a challenge, B) I thought it would be really cute. I love mini foods, I just find them adorable. It’s fun to watch someone try to do something silly like that.”
Afraid that his cake would stick to the sides of the tiny pans if he didn’t line them, Manganello called the company’s customer service line for clarification. The representative told him that there was no need to prep the pans, but that spraying a little bit of oil on them was okay.
After covering the pans with shortening and preheating the oven, Manganello began mixing up his cake using the small, colorful utensils that came with the Easy-Bake. In addition to eggs, oil and water, he used his ownJonnyCakes signature cake mixes: “Party On!” White Crème Cake Mix for the bottom tier and “Oh, Fudge!” Chocolate Cake Mix for the top.
“The trickiest part about baking in an Easy-Bake is you can only bake one layer at a time as opposed to a real oven where you can pop a bunch of pans in at once,” Manganello says. “So each layer took about 30 minutes to bake and there were six layers. It took a couple hours. I probably had it done, start to finish, in like five hours.”
Surprisingly, the cake was baked well — mostly. The part of the cake that’s nearest to the light bulb burned whereas the back half was cooked more properly.
The miniature layers were wiggly when stacked upon each other, which made frosting the cake difficult. But as a baking pro, Manganello was successfully able to get smooth layers of white frosting and swooping piping detail around the wedding cake. He then added fondant flower details.
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Manganello says the hardest part was actually sourcing small enough bride and groom figurines for the cake topper. He ended up having to use Legos.
“It was a hit. I would do it again,” says the occasional guest judge ofThe Try Guys' “Without a Recipe” competition. “And it’s a fun challenge for bakers out there or people with kids, or grown men without kids like me.”
source: people.com