This cake was made for a friend's bachelorette party back in
February (yes, all the way back in February). Given my time limitations with
work and school, the bride-to-be's sister kept the design request relatively
simple and picked a fun and flirty bustier in purple and grey to match the
wedding colours.
I am self-taught in terms of cake carving. I have seen some bustier cakes online in which they use a heart shaped pan for the top and bottom of the cake. I've also seen cakes in which the bust part is created using a bowl or ball-shaped pans. I am sure that this approach 'wastes' less cake (there is no waste of cake in this household!) however I don't own any heart-shaped pans and also wanted more control over the shape. Also, carving layered cakes versus using a bowl or ball-shaped pan ensures that every bite of the cake still has a good buttercream to cake ratio.
Once again, I did not plan to take pictures of the process of
cake-making, so this picture is taken with my iPhone with less-than-optimal
lighting (not really complaining about a sunny day as we had so few this
winter). I used a 9 x 13 inch pan and traced it onto a large sheet of freezer
paper. I then sketched the outline of the bustier within 9x13 space. I cut this
out and used this as my carving template. To make the top of the bustier (it
feels strange to write about breasts and cake together but also feels immature
to say 'cake boobs'), I baked and filled three 5-inch round cakes. I cut the
template apart where the cups meet the bodice and used it to carve away the top
of the bodice part to make room for the cups. Once everything was in place, I
worked on carving the curves working very gradually until I was happy with the
final shapes. I crumb-coating the entire shape, put it in the fridge to set and
then covered it in purple fondant. 
It is very challenging to get dark purple from white fondant. I would have liked a darker purple but time was not on my side. I used a ribbon cutting tool for the detailing on the bodice and
around the cups. To make the frills, I cut about 1-inch wide ribbons from
fondant mixed with some tylose and used a bulbous gum paste tool to ruffle the
edges.
The cake was chocolate filled with chocolate swiss meringue buttercream. With the cake and the fondant-covered large board, it ended up being quite a large and heavy cake to transport. I was extremely worried about dropping it. I somehow managed to hold this cake with one arm while locking the door to my house, and then proceeded down my icy steps and very icy driveway in very high stiletto boots to a taxi. I safely made it out of the taxi, across a very slippery lobby floor and got the cake to the party in one piece. Whew!
I have a couple of more projects to write about and will do that gradually when I need breaks between analyzing my data for my research. Cake-making will continue to be infrequent but I hope to be up and at it more frequently after the summer. Alternatively, if any of you blog-readers out there are statistics aficionados who like to help out random people on the internet, I can get back to baking sooner!
