Come with me, Under the Sea...

Its been a weekend of two cakes.  Two very very different cakes.  Both very definitely gluten free from beginning to end.  Both Chocolate Mud Cakes.  Both beautifully moist and totally de-railing my sugar-free run of the past month or so...doh!

This first cake was obviously a 21st cake but it was also my very first 2-tier cake which was a bit exciting.  The cake is in actual fact 3 cakes.  Two larger cakes on the bottom, leveled and filled with dark chocolate ganache, then crumb coat sealed with dark chocolate ganache.  The top cake was a double quantity baked in a smaller tin but with the sides lined high.  The top baked a little crisp but this was easily carved off when the cake was leveled, halved, filled with ganache then crumb coated with the same ganache.  Here are the finished cakes before assembly.

The brief for the cake was to incorporate both the underwater world as seen through the eyes of a diver as the birthday girl has just completed her Dive Master's course, and an above water element capturing the beach, lifesaving etc  in which she was also very competitive.

I was able to make a great many of the elements well in advance of assembly so that the final put-together would be more about placement rather than flat-out construction.  Here is a pic of many of the creatures and elements as I was making them.

I experimented with a new type of fondant on this cake too.

Its apparently quite new and has just arrived from the USA.  Rather than your boring non-descript coloured fondant- you can now choose your colour and your FLAVOUR with which to compliment your cake.  It was wonderful to work with.  It goes a long way, is not as sticky as traditional fondants but I have one word of caution.  If you are using it to create fondant figures that will require rigidity - this fondant will not give you that.  I created the Wooden Sign using this fondant and it looked fantastic.  Just the right colours - I was able to write on it clearly and easily but it just would not become totally rigid.  After two failed attempts at getting the sign hard enough to stand I had to resort to painting the back of the sign with tempered chocolate which then added the rigidity needed to keep the sign from tipping over.  Flavour and texture wise it is beautiful and ALL Gluten Free!

The cake was then covered in tinted blue fondant.  As I was using traditional fondant this time I decided to experiment by adding a flavouring to the fondant and added a few drops of butter flavouring to the plain fondant and it just lifted the flavour from plain sweet to something a little more interesting.  Both cakes were covered and then I stacked them.  I did not use dowels in the cakes as the Mudcakes on the base were so dense I was in no fear of any sinkage or collapse but I did have a cakeboard under the top tier cake.

OK - now we're talking.  Everything always looks so hokey as you assemble it.  I edged the cakeboard with black satin ribbon, centered the cakes then applied a light application of heated jam to the board to have the brown sugar stick to.  The light brown sugar was then sprinkled evenly all over the board.  This dries hard and stays well in place and looks exactly like sand.

Now to start positioning all the creatures and items.  This takes longer than you think as you have to think about which side to present it from, how it will look from all angles, what to do with spaces, gaps, uneven areas on the cake that need to be disguised etc.

I placed all the items on and rearranged them quite a few times until I got something I thought worked well.  Then I added the accents of the waves.  Dusted Silver Lustre Dust onto the waves, edging and some of the creatures to accent them and give them some shimmer.  I had to use 3 pieces of heavy grade florist wire which was wrapped.  One in the Palm Tree Trunk - to take the load from the fronds; one in the LifeSavers Flagpole; and one in the sign to hold it in on its jaunty angle.  My son was more fascinated at how I had managed to get the diver and the shark to 'float'.  They were just held in place with Royal Icing and wedged from underneath until dry and hard.

The birthday girl was very happy with her cake and that is the main thing with any creation isn't it ?

Lxx

1,2 Freddy's Coming For You...

Its been a few weeks since my last post and in that time my son has turned 8 and Ive had a wonderful couple of weeks on the beaches of Phuket in Thailand.

This post is about the cake I created for my Son's 8th Birthday - a Freddy Krueger Inspired affair.  Before anybody thinks I am an irresponsible parent - my son has never seen the film, but he is obsessed wtih all things gruesome and Halloween oriented so his choice of cake came as no surprise to me.

I wanted to create the famous hand with the knives on the fingers but that was hardly going to be enough to feed 10 children plus adults.  I came up with the idea to create the hand entirely from fondant and mount it on top of a loaf shaped cake like a stand.  I then created cupcakes with fondant toppers depicting the words from the wonderful theme song.  All inspired thru my searches on the wonderful Mr Google.  I used some cool techniques on this little project which I will talk u thru.  It is also the first time I have used my airbrush that Santa brought me - what a cool new tool that is !

Ok here goes...

This took a little bit of panning and preparation.  Instead of covering a cakeboard, I used a matt black core board that I purchased at Spotlight for about $6.  This was only suitable as the weight of the entire cake etc wasn't going to be too heavy.    I managed to locate some of the funky candles Ive been admiring on other people's cake creations also.  Matt Black cupcake wrappers completed the non-cakey items.

First up - my son isn't a big chocolate fan so the cakes are plain vanilla buttercake all gluten free.  I started work on the hand first.  I coloured some fondant a light brown colour and used my own hand as a modelling guide.  I knew I needed to make the cake and then have the fondant harden before mounting the hand.  I also knew I needed to have the hand curved slightly not straight so I dried the hand over the top of some scrunched up baking paper to allow it to hold its slightly curved shape.

While the hand was drying out I coloured some fondant a light grey colour and measured and cut out the knives for the four fingers.  Next step was to fire up the airbrush.  I used a dark brown in the airbrush to spray the hand and add texture.  It looked fantastic.  Then I added my silver food grade liquid and sprayed the knives.  Once these had dried, I modeled the silver plates for the glove on the hand, attached them and sprayed them silver also.  I created the rivets using the end of biro pen.  Perfect!  Now the conundrum - how to best attach the knives to the fingers without the weight of the knives either a) snapping the knife or b) snapping the finger from the hand...  I needed to get the hand off the board and into the air!  I made a Vanilla Cake in a loaf tin and covered with black fondant to make a type of plinth and centered it on the board.  It would support the length of the hand and fingers.

Using the loaf cake as a stand worked brilliantly.  I carved the cake a little on the top to support the slight curve in the hand and the and rested perfectly on it.  A couple of the fingers required the support of a toothpick thru them from underneath inserted in the cake just to prevent them cracking off.
The knives were then inserted into the middle of the fingers and held in place using tinted royal icing to really cement them in place.  I supported them on toothpicks until hard then removed the supports.

It was then time to really have some fun with the airbrush - getting the blood effect on the knives worked really well and I used a silver lustre powder to bring out the metallic pieces on the hand.

The cupcakes were just a basic GF Vanilla Cupcake topped with a vanilla buttercream icing using the technique in the icing bag of painting stripes of red colour inside the bag so that when piped it would create a red edging - very effective for my ghoulish cakes - then each was topped with its own fondant topper.  I managed to find a way to write on the black fondant with a tip from another decorator - I used my silver edible paint and a very fine paintbrush and handwrote the words - worked brilliantly!

Everything was then mounted onto the matt black core board - the candles were held in place with black royal icing and the cupcakes positioned around the hand.  The kids absolutely loved fighting over who was going to eat the knives and the fingers !!!

All in all a wonderful party and another cake success.

Lx