Yesterday I decorated this cake for a baby shower for Robin, a friend of a friend. I've met Robin a few times and she is a sweet person, I'm sure a wonderful teacher, and I was happy to make a cake for her and her baby girl - due next month.
I made a spice cake from "Rose's Heavenly Cakes." I've made the recipe before, but still I managed to make a serious mistake in the order in which I added the ingredients (mistaking buttermilk for butter); the first cake turned out less than perfect. It was still edible though, so I took it to school (my class mates eat a lot of my baking experiments gone awry). I managed to read the instructions correctly the second time and bake a lovely, spongy cake.
After I covered the cake in buttercream frosting, I rolled out the white fondant, then the green and pink. The white fondant was MUCH harder to roll. I'm not sure why, but it seemed to take forever. The other colors were so much easier. That part went fairly smoothly, although I don't think I will ever understand how anyone can make the fondant drape over the cake without major creases. I always have to cut slits to make the fondant fit the shape of the cake and then I have been seams running up the sides. No matter how many YouTube videos I watch, I cannot do it myself. Luckily the stripes and dots covered most of the seams (the rest I cleverly positioned out of the photo).
The last step was adding the bow - my first time attempting this feat. I could not roll the fondant out as thin as it really should have been, so the strips of fondant were quite thick and heavy. I looked at the instructions for how to do this in my Wilton fondant book, but as my usual impatient self, I didn't READ them. I just looked at the pictures and thought, "That looks easy, I can do this." About 30 minutes later I was about to completely give up on the bow and just stick another dot on the top when I realized I was missing a key step. The problem I was having was that the bow loops were all droopy and were just flopping over. It wasn't really looking like a bow. I realized, upon thinking back to the photos included in the instructions, that the bow loops are supposed to be laid out on their sides for a couple of hours until they become dry and stiff. Then you can stick them all together and they stay standing and hold their shapes.
I went to bed and assembled the bow in the morning. It only took five minutes. Maybe next time I'll actually read the instructions!
Nice photos! How did you get a reflection and a black background?
ReplyDeleteThe cake was sitting on one of the shiny end tables in the livingroom. I turned all the lights off in the room and just used natural light. I also set the camera WB on daylight. That seemed to work awesome to make the background black.
ReplyDeleteI'll admit, I'm a little bit in love with the third photo. =)