Large cakes and color are becoming a new theme! Last month I found the Wilton Performance Color System for baking and made a pumpkin cake for Halloween that was fun to make!

Now Thanksgiving has provided an opportunity to use the color chart again! Once again I went back to my old recipes and found a Turkey Cake recipe that I had made years ago. This cake, like the Pumpkin Cake, was the actual size of a roasted turkey.

I remembered that the last time I made it, I was disappointed with the final color of the turkey. It looked raw. Now that I had my color chart, I was hoping it would look more realistic this time. The recipe is from a back issue of Family Fun, which was my favorite magazine when my children were young.

You bake 2 vanilla cakes in round bowls. They take longer than when they are baked in 9 inch round pans.

Then bake 1 spice cake in a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan. Similarly it takes longer in the loaf pan than a round pan. I kept checking for doneness but I think they took about 40 minutes. The round bowls were closer to an hour. I just kept checking with a cake tester.

Once the cakes were finished I let them cool on a rack for 10 minutes and then popped them out to finish cooling.

This cake takes a lot of frosting. I used close to 4 cans of store bought buttercream frosting.

Before assembling the pieces I put the cake in the freezer for 15 minutes.

Basically you make a very large Whoopee Pie!

This is an important step- secure the “Whoopee Pie” with a dollop of frosting on the platter.

Trimming the legs out of the spice cake is tricky. Just keep trimming until it looks like a leg! Frosting hides a lot.

I used coffee stirrers (wooden ones) to attach the legs to the body (it is no longer a very large Whoopee Pie!)

It’s starting to look like a turkey. I also think it looks like a Harry Potter Snitch or Captain America’s mask.

Now to the color- I used “Sand” for the base layer of frosting.

Mixing 4 cans of frosting required my large mixer.

Once I frosted the cake with the base “Sand” color I added more brown and black to the remaining frosting until it turns a few shades darker. I added the darker color to the parts of the “turkey” that would darken as it cooks.

Adding the oranges and paper caps added a touch of authenticity!

It was fun to carve it like a turkey!

Happy Thanksgiving!