Romantic Wedding Dress Cake

So first of all, I am alive and well! :)  Sorry you haven't heard from me in a while.

Yesterday, I entered the Florida I.C.E.D. cake competition.  This was particularly tricky because I spent the whole week prior out in Colorado skiing with my dad (I know, poor me) but that meant I had to finish as much as I could before I left!  And do my homework and pack, etc. etc. etc...

I came back on Friday night and left for Florida early Saturday afternoon.  Fortunately, this cake is not real (i.e. the tiers are all dummies) which made transportation and lifting much easier.

For this competition, you had to select a picture of a wedding dress to use as inspiration and display it next to your cake-- here was my dress:

I liked this dress for a variety of reasons: 1) It's not white  2) I liked the fabric effects 3) The strings on the bodice/ shoulders lend themselves well to string work.

Speaking of string work...

My middle tier featured string and extension work suspended by pearls.  To do these sections, I had to flip the cake upside down, pipe the strings and extensions, then turn the cake right side up once the sections had set.

I was really excited about my floral spacer (all the flowers are gum paste, of course).  The judges seemed to really like my roses, so that makes me happy.  I really liked the colors.  The teal stephanotis may not be botanically correct, but that's part of the joy of gum paste, right??

My bottom tier featured fabric effects which I airbrushed with a pearl sheen.  I also set medallions between the tiers and then piped the suspended drop strings.  The board is isomalt (poured sugar) over aluminum foil.

There were more pictures taken at the show, but I don't have them yet.  When I get them, I will share them!

For the record, I was 2nd runner up in the professional division.  There were lots of awesome cakes!!

I also entered a couple of gum paste stilettos-- I will blog about those tomorrow, but I'll post pictures on my facebook page tonight if you can't wait! :)

Advanced Royal Icing Class

This past weekend I took another Nicholas Lodge class-- Advanced Royal Icing Techniques. :)  I decided to treat myself since my birthday is on Friday.

The class covered figure piping (which I hadn't really tried before), as well as color flow techniques, pressure piping, string work with and without bridges, and some Lambeth style borders.   In the above picture, the doves were piped on waxed paper separately, and the ribbon side design was transferred onto the cake and created using a color flow approach.


Here is an example of figure piping-- this cupid was all piped with royal icing tips 1 and 2:

As a contrast, the cupid on the right side of this picture was cut out of gum paste and then over-piped with a little royal icing for added detail.

Here's some stringwork with a piped bridge and lace points, with an embroidery side design.

And here are some pressure piped letters painted silver and then attached to the cake:

We did one more dummy cake in class featuring a color flow swan and some Lambeth style borders:

The swan has some 'real' feathers in there for added detail. :)


I was a little rushed at the end of class so you can see that my scroll under the scroll border started floating down as I went along.... but I like the top border.

The class was great fun and definitely inspired me to work more with royal icing... and to reopen my Lambeth book and try a few things. :)

Meanwhile, I'm going to be teaching my first sugar class in March!!  I'll be teaching gum paste stilettos March 5-6 at International Sugar Art Collection's Studio B in Norcross, GA.  Details will be posted soon at www.nicholaslodge.com.

So in the meantime, I've been refining my shoe techniques and preparing course notes-- I'm really excited for the class and really want it to go well!

That's all for now.  Hopefully I'll still have enough time to make a snazzy birthday cake this weekend... :)

Wedding Cake Competition-- Finally!

After much anticipation..... ta da!

My final design featured isomalt gems and board, gum paste flowers: 60 hydrangea, 80 stephanotis, 25 fully blown roses, 5 rose buds, 1 mid size rose, 16 dendrobium orchids and assorted rose and hydrangea leaves.  There were also some fondant pearls and string-work, as well as a 50-50 paste bow and brooch.

From the bottom up, my flavors were: cream cheese pound cake with amaretto cream, chocolate blackout cake with espresso truffle filling and chambord syrup, butter cake with white chocolate raspberry cream, and another chocolate blackout cake on the top.


Finally had the competition yesterday-- I'm still exhausted and I feel like my head is going to explode.  :oP  I was pretty happy with my cake overall except that I wanted the tiers to be blacker and squarer.

My friend Prem came over before the show and took a bunch of really great quality pictures for me.

Then I had to transport this beast...

Unfortunately, my seats in my car aren't completely flat (though I tried to compensate a little with some extra foam), but in the 90 degree weather, things slid a little bit.  I also had to take off my top tier and carry it separately so that everything would fit through the door, and it slid a little bit in its box and destroyed its ribbon around the bottom.  So when I set up, my cake looked like it was leaning and that ribbon was just a disaster.

I fixed things as best I could (my friends swore that the table was sagging and that was contributing to the leaning issue) and then I just had to walk away because I was so frustrated.  If I hadn't been so tired, I would have thought to shim the cake board under the front left corner, and I think everything would have been much better.  Now I know.

This event was soooo long.  I set up @2:45, judging started at 4, and they didn't announce the winners till 8!  I was STARVING!  And sleep-deprived, and tired of standing by my leaning cake... 

One thing that I find frustrating is that I wonder if I even understood the 'rules'.  I put rules in quotations because their rules consisted of a couple sentences saying that you had to have at least a 10" base with variable height.  Totally edible, cakes and cupcakes in any combination.  'Creative Wedding Cake and Cupcake Competition.'  Okay, from that I take away 'I need to make a wedding cake with at least a 10" base, and I'm welcome to use cupcakes as well'.  Until one of the judges came up me and asked where my cupcakes were.  Ummmm..... ?????  Seeing as how the winner and runner up both had cupcakes in their designs, I wonder if I completely missed the mark on my design.  Unfortunately, I didn't get score sheets, so I really don't know what the verdict was.

After judging was completed, I was overwhelmed with people wanting slices of my cake.  And my mother suggested bringing boxes for the slices, which turned out to be brilliant!  People loved my cake and loved more that I could package it in an easy-to-carry mini cake box for them.  When I was fast enough, I put on little 'Cakes by Roxanne' stickers, designed by my wonderful Aunt Carol. All in all, it was a big success.

Now I just need to clean up my poor apartment.

And I'll be sticking to much smaller projects for the foreseeable future. ;)

Something blue-ish?

I just finished a wedding cake class at the Cake Art store, and here is the cake we made in class today!

That's the short story... let's talk about this cake a little bit more.

Remember that Thursday night I wrapped up Wilton Course 3, for which I needed a fondant covered cake and a dummy, and 40 fondant roses.  So I had Friday off, and then for today I needed another cake and 2 dummies iced and ready to go, 350+ royal icing drop flowers, and a whole lot of buttercream. 

Well, I had already made a triple batch of buttercream on Monday, and I was hoping that would be enough, but at midnight last night I had my doubts and made an extra batch.

I started making my cake (the 9" tier) at around 3:30 PM yesterday afternoon, and I decided to try a new recipe from Margaret Braun's book.  Her recipe was for 10" pans, and I thought I scaled down enough batter by making some cupcakes and poured generously into my 9" pans so that I would be sure to have a 4" tier without additional torting.  I overfilled the pans so badly, and made such a mess, it took a Christ-like miracle to make these cakes into something that looked like a reasonably stable 9" tier, and the scraps filled 12 baskets.  Not to mention the giant mess in the bottom of my oven, which I still haven't dealt with...  

So I managed to make it to class on time with all my supplies at 10:30 this morning on not nearly enough sleep and with a serious case of caffeine jitters from my morning coffee. 

I did this whole cake in 3 hrs and 15 minutes.  The class was 3 hrs long, and after we were done with the doweling and stacking, I pretty much felt like I was on TLC's Ultimate Cake-Off.  When there were 15 minutes left I was positively frantic, my hand was shaking like a leaf, and just plowed through to create a complete cake by the time we had to pack up and go.

As a result, I can see sloppiness in parts of the cake, but I think the overall result is still pretty nice.  If I had more time, it would have looked more polished.  But I have real perfectionism issues....

Again, I don't like the plastic pillars, but I did not design this cake.  I learned some new techniques, like the vertical shell columns on the middle tier, and the crown shell border on the top of both the 6" and 12" tiers.

I really enjoy doing stringwork, but I was doing it in a rush, and it drives me crazy when all the strings don't look identical (which to my eye they don't.)  Again, that perfectionism problem.

At the last minute, there was an opening in Cake Art's Business of Cakes class this afternoon, so right after constructing my wedding cake, I ran to Subway for some sustenance (I was shaking violently at this point from lack of nutrition), and came back for a 3 hour lecture on the cake business.  This lecture reaffirmed my suspicion that there is no way I could get a food service permit for my apartment kitchen, but I definitely learned a few new things...

Anyway, it's been a long day of cake!  I'm kind of relieved that my cake courses are over for a bit so I have time to catch up on cleaning up and working out. My kitchen is a mess and my hands have a constant smell of sugar.  But not to worry, there will be more cakes soon...