Dear college,
I don’t normally have good things to say about you, but thank you for giving me a week off on the same week of my brother’s birthday. I actually had time to do something I loved for once, rather than suffer through the stack of unfamiliar papers on my desk that have recently been the bane of my very existence. I’m aware that the week off was just a fortunate coincidence, but thanks anyway. My Guitar-Hero-loving brother loved the cake.
Sincerely,
Girl who has no idea why she’s majoring in Pharmacy
The finished product...everything is edible (except for the aluminum foil)
Hi everyone! Remember me? Yeah…I’m that girl who used to blog. Now I’m the girl who goes to college for 10 hours a day and comes home too exhausted to do anything but sleep until the day repeats itself. As you might have deduced from my imaginary letter to college, I had the week off the same week as my brother’s birthday, which gave me time to plan a cool cake for him!
A sketch of how I wanted the guitar to look like
I’m definitely still an amateur at this whole cake decorating thing, but I’m really happy/surprised with how this cake turned out. The best part was that it was a complete surprise to my brother for his 18th birthday. He had known that I was making him a cake–he was the one who’d chosen the vanilla cake/strawberry frosting combination– but he had no idea what kind of cake I was making.
The cake decorating/making process itself definitely wasn’t as hard as I’d pictured it to be, :) Oh, and remember how I said it was near-impossible to make black fondant? Well, for this cake I made the black fondant, and I still stand by the statement that it is near-impossible to make your own black fondant. For the sake of all that is good and holy in the world, do not try making your own black fondant…unless of course you want to waste approximately half of the expensive Super Black Americolor icing you just purchased and temporarily stain/paralyze your hands from the 20+ minutes of kneading/adding powdered sugar. It’s totally up to you, though.
This was a double layer cake, made with (3 batches of) delicious vanilla sponge cake and one batch of strawberry buttercream frosting. Lots of sugar, butter, and love went into this cake.
This isn’t exactly a tutorial–more of a picture show. The problem is I didn’t take pictures of the actual fondant decorating…it was way too stressful to be thinking about pictures when I was locked in the kitchen trying to make a super secret surprise birthday cake, but I took the same exact steps as posted in the iPhone Cake tutorial, with the additional step of cutting the cake out into the shape I wanted using the template I drew on parchment paper. It was easier than I had anticipated, thank goodness!
I also created my own cake board out of cardboard. I duct-taped two large cardboard rectangles together to make a firm board, and proceeded to wrapping it in aluminum foil. Worked like a charm :)
When in doubt, tape two large cardboard pieces together (to make it firm) and cover in aluminum foil :)
And here is the cake before and after covering in fondant (the before is after I crumb-coated the entire cake):
Pretty cool, huh? Fondant never ceases to amaze me. Continue reading
