It's been nearly 4 months since I've blogged. Nothing surprising there. It's not that interesting things haven't happened, it's just that so many of them have happened! After not blogging for so long, I decided that my next blog post had to be something pretty big.
We all know that I love cakes, both decorating and eating, and, like most southern women, I show my love with food. In the South, if there is an emotion, we satisfy it with food. Sad? We give you comfort food. Happy? We give you cake! I'm no different. So when my sister-in-law asked me to be her matron of honor, of course Insaid yes. Then, I started planning!
I planned Abbey's bridal shower with the help of another bridesmaid, Jen. I really can't say enough awesome things about Jen, she just made shower planning so easy! We came up with a Broadway theme because that's what Abbey and her fiancee, Christian, like to do. We came up with a simple menu, decorations, games, etc. But I knew, deep in my heart, that I was going to do an outrageous cake. Mostly because I love Abbey, but also because I apparently like to push myself really far.
To Pinterest I went! I found lots of good cupcake ideas, but I was taking a cake decorating class with my friend Sarah and learning how to do fondant, so of course I thought "Why not make a crazy elaborate cake?!" Who wouldn't think that, right?
I scanned through multiple photos until I came across two cakes that I liked.
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| I took the skyline and theater stage idea from this cake |
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I took the playbill and roses from this cake
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I loved the skyline and the "stage" part of the first cake and I liked the Playbills of the second cake. I decided to do a mix of the two cakes. Thankfully, I did a trial run of the cake. Other than what we did in class, I honestly had never messed with fondant before. It was a whole new world of cake decorating for me and, me being me, I decided to go big or go home. Usually, I go big or go home the day of an event and meltdowns ensue and it's just not pretty. When I told my husband what I wanted to do, he reminded me of my past experiences and gently (read: demanded) that I practice first. He's a smart guy.
And so I made my trial cake. I used a box mix of maple cake because I get tired of always eating white cake. I ordered the good fondant (Satin Ice) in a big 5 lb tub of white for the majority of the cake and then smaller packages of red and black fondant because those colors are so hard to achieve with tinting. I didn't want to use the good stuff, though, so I used my left over Wilton fondant and tinted it for my trial run cake.
I made the Playbills first. I made them out of gum paste so they would dry hard. I was very proud of them!
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| My first playbill. I measured 2" wide by 3" high based on the size of my top cake. |
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| I made two the exact same size, then I angled one like they did in the picture. |
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| I used black water color to write out "playbill." Writing is not my forte, as you will see. |
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| Again. |
Then I covered my bottom cake with fondant and used a stencil to cut out the skyline. The skyline was much taller than my cake and I ended up having a lot of the building fold over the top of the bottom cake. I used food coloring to water color the cake blue instead of using a blue fondant. I made the top cake next. The top cake was short because I overfilled the 6" cake pans and they didn't cook through all the way, even after being in the oven for 45 minutes! I salvaged what I could and worked on the fondant for the curtains.
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| The first cake I covered with fondant other than the one cake we did in class. This is why you do trial runs! |
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| See how much space there is below the skyline and how far up the buildings go? |
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| I added yellow windows on the trial cake, but left them off the real cake. My fondant, as you can see, is also a lot thicker on this skyline than on the real cake. |
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Oh baby. This took 8 hours to decorate and it wasn't even finished! No bottom borders, no monogram, nothing on top. Still, though, not terrible for my first shot at this.
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My trial cake was pretty sad, but I wasn't too hard on myself because it was a trial cake, after all! It was also the first time I'd ever done something so elaborate and I knew that it would look better when I had the true colors on the cake, not just what I tinted to see the difference.
I learned a lot from that trial run!
- Schedule
- The trial run cake I did between a Friday and Saturday. I baked the cakes Friday night and decorated them Friday morning. It took me nearly 8 hours on Saturday to crumb coat and decorate the cakes, time I knew I didn't have the day of the shower. So I came up with a schedule: Tuesday - make buttercream, Wednesday - bake cakes, Thursday - crumb coat cakes, Friday night - decorate the cakes! I followed that schedule and only spent about 2 hours Saturday morning finishing up details on the cake.
- New cake mix
- The cake mix that I used originally was too moist and soft. The bottom cake didn't hold up well under the fondant and the weight of the top cake, which was smaller than the real top cake would be. I did some research (googled) and found this awesome recipe for white almond sour cream cake which uses white cake mix, but makes a much more dense cake that also happens to taste amazing! It will definitely be my new go-to cake mix (just make sure to make half the recipe!).
- Skyline
- The skyline on the trial run cake was too tall. There was a lot of extra space on the bottom, so I chopped that off to make it shorter on the real cake. The fondant was also way too thick the first time I did it, which made it hard to carve out the buildings. They came out much smoother when I rolled the fondant out more. I think it looks much better, like a real skyline, on the real cake.
- Better techniques
- Any time you do something the first time, you learn better ways to do it. I learned better ways to drape the fondant so that I didn't have to do extra decorations to hide my sloppy work.
The result was a completely different looking cake!
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| Shorter skyline with thinner fondant. I also used less color to achieve a lighter blue for the sky. I also used straws for extra support. |
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| I also added a gold border to clean it up a bit. |
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| The top of the real cake. The bottom border is hard to see, but it has a slight gold tint to it as well. |
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| Finished product! I practiced that monogram at least 10 times and it still didn't come out as good as I would have liked. |
Is it exactly like the Pinterest photos above? No. But am I happy with how it turned out? You bet I am! And the next cake that I make will probably be even better thanks to everything I learned from this cake! The best part is that Abbey also loved her cake!
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| Cake at the shower on my awesome cake stand (thanks Home Goods!) |
