Cake Decorating; ACT 1

While I've been away we've been working on plated desserts and chocolate sculptures...neither are getting posted right now, though I will get them up soon! I'm promising.

In March I started thinking about how I was going to decorate my wedding cake in the final section of my pastry program. I had come up with what I thought was going to be a great concept...THEN I found out we get to design three cakes!!! How excited am I? And how unprepared...oops! Good thing I think quickly when it comes to cake ;)

Our first cake is a faux/styrofoam cake. I wanted to save my original concept for my final cake and at the same time I wanted my faux cake to be a fairly simple concept, being my very first time working with fondant. Initially I wanted to do a beach cake, then realized that could potentially involve sand and/or sea shells, neither of which I was interested in incorporating into a wedding cake. I switched my concept slightly to an ocean theme...I know, right off the bat it doesn't seem that there's much difference, but trust me there is.

Here's a final shot of my completed Ocean Cake:


Overall I'm very pleased with the outcome, and, of course, there are many things I learned and would do differently if remaking this cake! Oh the joys of learning. You are unable to tell in any of the photos I have but I painted the sand dollars with a shiny pearl paint and luster dusted the starfish with a shiny white.

Once I formed the starfish & did the detail work on their backsides I laid them in these bowls to dry with their rounded shapes overnight & then piped the detail work on their front this morning:


The coral and sand dollars were piped out the day before in royal icing:

For the coral I used two different piping tips and just stayed focused on making sure each branch was connected to another branch, that way when I removed the icing from the parchment all the parts were connected....that is, until I dropped some pieces and they broke...though on the bright side it gave me differing sizes of coral. For the sand dollars I piped a large circle with a small circle in the middle then diluted some royal icing and "flooded" the space between to get a smooth, even surface. The next morning I piped the detail before applying to the cake.

Doing the work to roll out enough fondant to wrap around a 12", 9" and a 6" cake was much more work than I'd anticipated, mostly because I couldn't work quickly enough to prevent the fondant from drying out a little bit before being able to get it on the cake. I love the color and shape of the waves, not to high & not too low:

I watch a lot of cake competitions on the Food Network and often hear judges talk about the seams of fondant on the back of the cake so I wanted to snap a shot of my seams...considering this is the first seam I've made I'm saving it as a reference of how far I've come once I am able to make a seamless seam!


Some additional/close up shots I took of the cake:


I promised my chef that while I really wanted to do an ocean themed wedding cake I promised that I would make it classy and I'm certain that I've achieved that. The next two cakes are actual cake so I'm going to be working with a potentially lopsided cake (my frosting skills aren't quite up to par yet) and so I'll get lots of practice in patience :) I'll keep the blog updated as I move through this final section. I'm down to 10 more days of school until I'm done and off to a six week externship...yay!!! I am so excited.