Ivory Wedding Cake with Champagne Bow and Gum Paste Flowers

This past weekend I made a wedding cake (and a groom's cake, next post) for my friend Amanda, who I met taking tap dancing classes here in Atlanta.  She asked me no less than a year ago about doing her wedding cake and groom's cake, so of course I accepted!  But this was no easy feat-- this cake weighed 50+ pounds and had to travel all the way to Augusta with the accompanying groom's cake.  And let's remember I have an apartment-sized kitchen and a not-so-amazing oven.  Making enough room in the fridge... also a challenge.  Here are the 4 tiers for the bride's cake and the parking spot for the groom's cake.  Not a whole lot of room for much else...

Another part of this story that has not yet made it to my amazing blog readers is that I defended my thesis on April 30!  And passed!!!  That means I finish up my thesis revisions and as of this Friday I am DONE with my PhD.  I'll graduate officially in August.  :)  This also means that I didn't have much time to work on stuff in advance as I usually do.

But I started the flowers about a month ago.  The bride wanted pale pink and green hydrangea, and I suggested pink cymbidium orchids as focal flowers along with some little dendrobium orchids.  I had a new mini-cymbidium cutter set that I was excited about, so this was a great opportunity to try it out.

This is the un-dusted cymbidium... cute huh?  I kind of love it.

I finished the flowers over the weekend and finished assembling the topper on Monday.
Here's the dusted dendrobium orchid:

And the painted/ dusted cymidium... it really comes to life, right?

Here's the assembled topper:

I had some fun figuring out how to get the fondant pearls to stay in place on the silver wires, but I thought the end result was pretty nice.

As far as the rest of the cake, I designed it together with the bride based on some other ideas she liked, her wedding colors, her dress, and her number of servings.  I made a mold of the brooch she wore on her dress and created a replica to be featured in the center of the bow.

The cake traveled fully assembled all the way to Augusta, thanks to some help from my friends. :)  I borrowed a friend's SUV and had some heavy lifting help (+ sandwich delivery and general moral support) from my 'date'. ;)

I finished the cake with just a few more cymbidiums on the bottom corners.

The topper went perfectly with the centerpieces, and the ribbon/ brooch was a perfect match to the bride's dress.  And obviously, I was really happy that everything arrived in one piece.

Congratulations Amanda and Philip! :)

Holiday Poinsettia Cake

Holiday Poinsettia Cake 

Photography by Prem Midha

Yesterday I entered my second cake competition.  This was the Patty Cakes Holiday Cake Affair in Decatur, GA.  My first competition was also a Patty Cakes show in September: This Cake :)

This time I was much more calm and prepared.  Okay, I don't know about calm, but definitely more prepared! 

Ivory Gum Paste Poinsettia

 

While the ideas for this cake definitely evolved in my head over the last couple of months, I ended up solidifying my design by making a few sketches and picking my favorite.  

The first things I made were the poinsettias and the little holly royal icing lace points encircling base of the top tier:

(Aren't Prem's pictures awesome?)

Anyway, I based the little 1" lace points on an Earlene Moore pattern which I modified to meet the holly/ holiday theme.  

As for the gum paste poinsettias (which you can see in my previous post)-- well, when I realized they were just over 8" in diameter, I figured I'd better make over-sized cake tiers so that they didn't swallow the cake whole. 

That means I baked 12 cakes (15 if you count the batch I screwed up) to make 5.5" tall tiers (standard height is generally 4").  My flavors this time were chocolate cake with dark chocolate peppermint ganache and butter cake with rum syrup and eggnog filling.  Now, normally I'm a chocolate person, like seriously.  When eating a non-chocolate cake I often find myself thinking 'this is good except that it's not chocolate.'  The exception was that butter cake with the eggnog filling.   These were some tall cakes!

Remember, I do all this at home: read, one oven and a fridge that was still full of Thanksgiving leftovers 3 days ago... ;) 

Anyway, I'll tell you more about the details on the cake and then I'll tell you more about the competition...

I covered the cake in red Satin Ice fondant.  It wasn't terribly cooperative.  Normally I have very little trouble with white Satin Ice, but the red coloring dries out the fondant and my apartment was pretty cold and dry when i was trying to roll it out.  I couldn't get it as thin as I normally do, but I ultimately prevailed.

All of the details were either fondant, gum paste or royal icing.  That round ornament is royal icing. :)  The pearls were all fondant.  Oh by the way, do you love that ribbon around the board as much as I do? 

 

The snowflakes were gum paste, and the fabric/ ribbon swags were a fondant and gum paste blend. 

So, the competition.  I did a lot more things right this time.  First, I finished my cake at about 1:30 AM and managed to get a full night's sleep. In the morning, I had time to eat breakfast and get packed before Prem came to take pictures.  I had a full entourage of friends with me, and we packed some wraps so that I'd have something to eat after I set up.  AND my friend with an SUV was able to drive the cake over.  Score.

I had the whole cake set up at home for pictures and it traveled perfectly.  All I had to do was un-box it, orient it, and check it when I got there.  No repairs or additional set up was required. *phew*  So I set up and ate some lunch.

For the record, as soon as I start to walk in, I get nervous.  I'm far too nervous to check out the competition when I first walk  in.  Everything is very intimidating.  This time, since I had eaten and slept (and we had chairs to sit by our cakes-- last time I stood almost the entire time), I was in much better spirits.  My competitors on either side of me were wonderful and I had a great time socializing with them and talking cakes.   Here's a picture I took after I'd set up at my table:

Not leaning this time! :)

So, in this competition they judge on originality, neatness, and taste (supposedly).  The unfortunate thing is there's no published rubric or score sheet, nor do you receive such a sheet after being judged.

After 4 hours, I was more than ready to hear the results.  My heart was jumping out of my chest.  Unfortunately, I did not place, even though a couple of the judges told me I was 'really close.' 

While most cake decorating competitions are not scored on taste and have a more obvious scoring rubric, I think it's important to remember the Earlene Moore school of thought on competition: Never enter a competition expecting to win.  I was proud of my entry and saw some great cakes and learned some stuff in the process, so that's great. 

Another 'different' thing about this competition is that after the results are announced, you cut slices of your cake for your public.  For the record, it's really hard not to doubt yourself when a kid tastes your cake and makes a face.  I guess this particular kid had tried some of the chocolate with peppermint and didn't like mint!  Eeesh.  People's cake tastes can be widely different-- all my friends loved my cake and you should have seen how fast that cake was disappearing at school today.  Clearly it wasn't grimace-worthy or people wouldn't have been flooding my lab to get a piece.  Still, these situations do come up and sometimes it's hard not to make a face back! :) 

Finally, I'd like to thank all my friends who came out and supported me yesterday.  You guys are the best!

Maybe I didn't place because I was the only contestant not wearing a chef's coat... it's just not my style! :)

Thanks for looking and let me know if you have any questions about my cake or the competition!  Hope you all have a great week. :)

Quilted Fantasy Flower Cake

This cake was made for my friend Tamera for her masters defense, which was this morning. :)

I started and finished this cake yesterday.  However, the 'finished' part was easier said than done...  Some cakes just don't share your vision.  This cake was a lesson in patience and structural integrity.

I made my favorite Chocolate Blackout Cake, and this time I decided to torte the layers.  This might have been bad idea number 1.  Then, I opted to create my own white chocolate cream cheese filling on the fly, which tasted great, but was very soft.  Using this to fill AND cover the cakes might have been bad idea number 2.  To make a long story short, the first time I covered this cake in fondant, it was a) lopsided, b) lumpy, and c) a general cake-tastrophe.  And that was at 11 PM...

Oy.  This was round 2, after I ripped off the fondant, removed most of my icing, and lobbed off the top layer.  My 'tall cake' concept got shorter.  Fortunately, this cake didn't need to serve too many people, so it didn't matter that it shrunk...

I had to make good old-fashioned sturdy, crusting, class buttercream to cover the sides and top of this cake to prevent any additional filling from oozing out between the layers.  Then I let this cake set up in the fridge, and re-covered it in my light yellow fondant.

The fondant still wasn't as cooperative as I would have liked, but you can see it looks pretty good after the quilting, which I did with the PME quilting tool and a ruler.

Then, I had already made these fantasy flowers (which I made up on my own) earlier in the day:

I made them using slightly stiffened fondant and concentric circle cookie cutters, which I then trimmed into 5 petal flowers and thinned just like the fondant roses I showed you a few posts ago.  For the centers, I used tylo glue (made from Tylose powder  and water)  to affix a bunch of 2 mm silver dragees and 5 stamen (these are store-bought-- Wilton).

I had also made some leaves out of white fondant, which I dusted with some Nu Silver luster dust.  The last thing I did was create some stems, which I hand rolled, dusted with luster dust, and attached to the cake using Tylo glue.

By 2 AM, it looked like a cake.

I also piped a bead border around the bottom with some regular buttercream.

I managed to win the fight with this cake-- well, more or less. :)

So what's coming up?

Well, next Saturday I have a class on embossed buttercream, where we'll learn to use impression mats, make pearls, and make a loopy gum paste bow.

Also, I'm thinking about entering a cake competition at the end of June.  It's a little bit complicated, because I have commitments for 4 days prior to it, and the cake HAS to be real-- no dummies!  But I think I have a strategy... Work on elements for this cake will commence very shortly.

Finally, I got some new supplies from Global Sugar Art today, including pink cake boxes!  So now I'll have some nice looking packaging for the cakes I give away, and I'm working on coordinated labels for the boxes...  I'll show you when I get everything set!

Have a great week...