Birds of a feather

Sorry to all of those following my cake decorating journey (Mom) … I’ve been a bit of a procrastinator when it comes to posting about my creations, reading week did in fact get the best of me. But since you have all been patiently waiting (Mom..) you will be rewarded with the gift of two cakes today!

For the first cake, I decided to recreate an owl topped cake that I had found on pinterest. For the actual owl, I decided to cover a rice krispie cake ball in coloured fondant. Simple enough task, right? Wrong. I decided to half the recipe for the rice krispie cake because I didn’t need it all… I don’t know if was doing that or the fact that I used year old marshmallows, but something went very wrong.

The owl base is less of a rice krispie cake and more of a core of melty marshmallows rolled in rice krispies. Though it didn’t turn out as planned, I still managed to cover the bad boy in some feathers I cut out of fondant and spruced him up by adding a beak, feet and two ever-so-large eyes.

Who could say no to a face like that? To spice up the cuties vanilla cake pedestal I threw on some polka dots that I painted on with fondant gel dye.

Apparently I have been going with a bit of a bird theme with my cakes lately. I didn’t even realize it until I started to type out this post, but if any of my cakes were to have been categorized together so far, these two were the best fit.

For my second cake I decided to paint a peacock feather onto a plain white fondant base. I mixed my fondant gels with water so it was kind of like I was doing a watercolour painting but with food colouring. There isn’t too much I have to say about this cake… aside from my struggle to get a smooth fondant base for the painting my biggest worry was that I kept setting my hand into freshly painted dye. After a few touch ups here and there I had myself a cute little feather cake!

 

he did the monster mash…

I really should have thought a little harder before deciding to take on cake decorating as my learning projects for EAES… Eating healthy and cake decorating really don’t mesh well. If anyone would like to become the official taste-tester seriously let me know. I have consumed way too much cake in the last month.

This weeks cake was a chocolate monster with blue buttercream icing.

Just a word of advice to all of you cake bakers out there… Listen to the instructions… Mine told me to split my batter up between to cake pans, but I wanted a giant monster cake, so I didn’t listen. This led to me having to cook the cake for an extra 20 minutes and it was still gooey in the middle. I eventually gave up on it and took it out of the oven and the middle sunk in a bit.. It wasn’t the prettiest of cakes, but I knew I’d be covering it with icing so I just stuck with it.

I started off decorating my cake by making a mouth for my monster out of fondant and some eyes made from marshmallows and fondant colouring.

After this I whipped up my first batch of buttercream icing (I’m not sure if its supposed to legitimately taste like butter, but mine did… might need to tweak the recipe a bit). I began piping on small dots of icing onto the cake which soon turned into a disaster. Icing started coming out of the wrong end of the icing bag, it was all over my hands, the counter, the wall and the floor. Not to mention, these icing dots were pretty tedious work that led to a few hand cramps.

After what felt like days, I had finally covered all of my little monster… time to put that bad boy in the fridge…. Easier said than done. Its safe to say the about 50% of the items in the fridge are now covered with bits of blue icing… But at least my little monster found a happy little home where he could bide his time until the brain surgery…..

 

Rubik’s Cube

This week I took on what I thought was going to be a simple cake… a rubik’s cube. All I had to do was cut out three squares of cake, ice them and stick on some coloured fondant  squares. (I made my little squares by colouring small chunks of fondant, rolling them out and cutting them with a pizza cutter)

 

Well let me tell you… it was not that easy at all. Crumbly cake corners are quite difficult to ice (though that might be my fault, I cheaped out and bought the $1 cake mix…) I finished a square and a half before I got mad and decided to give up on the cake for the night and throw it in the fridge.

I did some brainstorming at work the next day with a coworker about how I could work with my crumbly cake. After establishing that I was too lazy to bake a new cake she suggested I freeze the cake. She’s a brilliant girl.. it worked quite well.. much less crumbling and falling apart.

I iced those bad boys and stuck on my fondant squares. I ended up making two of the cakes because they were so small, and the second one ended up turning out much nicer than the first.

I don’t know if I will be making such a small, finicky, square cake in the near future….   Even blogging about this cake is bringing back my feelings of anger towards it….