6.06.2008

Reach for the Stars!

My youngest sister graduated just from high school last weekend. Eek! Well her ambition in life is to be an actress. Theater.. movies..TV... who knows? At this point she can do anything. So with that in mind, the theme for her graduation party was "Reach for the Stars".

For her cake I decided to try something new (big shocker, eh?) and go with a topsy-turvy design. The colors of the party were gold, silver and black. Here's my original design:















She also wanted to have two different flavors of cake and filling in order to accomodate everyone's tastes. So the bottom layer was white cake with strawberry filling, and the middle and top tier were chocolate cake with vanilla custard filling. Because each cake was going to be cut at an angle, I decided to do 3 layers of cake and 2 layers of filling per cake, instead of my usual 2:1 ratio. Baking and filling prep came along nicely. I had a bit of trouble though when I started cutting in to the cakes. I realized I really should have made them a bit taller, but that's a lesson learned for next time ;) Once they were all angled and stacked, I assembled them and put a crumb coat layer of icing on. Here's the cake with the crumb coat before a trip to the fridge to set:














After that had set I iced the cakes. Now... remember the gold and silver colors? Yeah, not exactly easy to make those colors out of buttercream icing and fondant. So you'll see what I ended up with.

OH! And my new favorite gadget: the icer tip! It's awesome. It's a tip with a huge wide flat opening so that you can actually pipe the icing on to the cake instead of having to keep spooning it out of a bowl. Talk about a time-saver! Plus it gives you a nice even thickness all the way around the cake. Love it!

Here's what the cake looked like once I put the icing on:

















The process up until this point had gone fairly smooth. Actually, it all pretty much went better than I thought. I really only had issues once I stared dealing with the fondant. At first I didn't think I was going to have enough, so I tried to make another batch, but it didn't come out right. BIG waste of time. After that it just became more time consuming than anything else. I had to color all the fondant, get all the shapes cut out, and get them on the cake. I ended up changing the design a little because the silver fondant that was supposed to go on the top wasn't really working with me. But I think it still turned out nice. Here are some final pictures of the cake at the party:




1 comment:

Jessica's Edible Art said...

I like your cakes as well, its a totally different style, stuff I have not tried yet. It was such a pleasure to meet you guys the other days. I would love to hang out sometime. I sundays and mondays off work, lets get together some time. My email is tiger2626@hotmail.com.