Slaying It

DOUBLE DEMON: Regular readers know we have been making birthday cakes for kids in homeless shelters for years now. We tend to gravitate toward the cakes we think other volunteer bakers won't take on, due to the topic requested. This means we end up doing cakes decorated in themes ranging from Tupac Shakur to an astronaut Godzilla to an artistic cat.

Recently, we saw a request for a Demon Slayer themed cake. We knew that to be a Japanese anime, but nothing else about the franchise. It seemed like that might be a request that went unfulfilled, so we signed up, not really knowing what we were getting ourselves into. Naturally, we turned to the Google. 

According to the Wikipedia article about the series, "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (鬼滅の刃, Kimetsu no Yaiba, "Blade of Demon Destruction"[4]) is a Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Koyoharu Gotouge. It follows teenage Tanjiro Kamado, who strives to become a demon slayer after his family was slaughtered and his younger sister Nezuko turned into a demon."

Well, that sounds rather dark ... But apparently it's popular. As of last year, there were more than 150 million copies of the manga in circulation and the movie "Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba – The Movie: Mugen Train," released in October 2020, became the highest-grossing anime film and Japanese film of all time.

The story features several colorful characters, so we didn't really know which direction to go with the cake. We asked Birthday Dreams if they could find out which character was the child's favorite. We were told it is Zenitsu Agatsuma, an honest and kind boy with self doubt but special talents.

Given that, we decided to make a modeling chocolate sculpture of him as our cake topper. And by we, I mean Annabelle.

                                       

ROUND TWO: It seemed like no sooner had we delivered the first Demon Slayer cake than CJ received an email from Birthday Dreams asking if we would take on another one. Um, sure? 

We wanted to go a totally different direction this time, so it was back to the Google. After some poking around, I found myself wondering if cookie cutters for these characters existed. I turned to Amazon and found a set featuring eight of the characters. But the cutters were super tiny - just a couple of inches tall apiece. I thought that might be an OK size to make fondant versions of the characters and have them on the sides of the cake. But then as Annabelle and I talked more about it, we pivoted to the idea of making little cookies to put around the cake. And then that morphed into making cupcakes with the character toppers, and a petite cake with the child's name in the Demon Slayer font/logo style.

One thing we had to do was figure out who each of the characters were, and what they looked like. What would we do without the Internet?

In the end, our vision came together in a most pleasing manner - well, at least to us. We sure hope the birthday child liked it (name changed to protect anonymity).

Below is the character that was featured on our first Demon Slayer cake. This was a smaller, cuter version. Annabelle said the art style is called chibi, actually.

The photo below shows that sometimes in life, you have to paint with a toothpick. This project was one of those times.

Here's a close up of four of the main characters. The one with the scar on his forehead is the main character in the series, Tanjiro Kamado.