Bachelorette Cake

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!

"There's a hair on this cake"

When I was in the midst of making this cake back in July for my brother-in-law's birthday, I had no intention of posting it on my blog. I wasn't quite sure how it was going to turn out as I have only done two carved cakes before and the subject matter was a little, shall we say, inelegant. 

Let me give a little bit of context to this cake. Back in May, I bought my sister a birthday card on which there was a rather hairy lad posing with barely there cutoff shorts and on the inside of the card it said something along the lines of "see, there are worse things than getting older." My sister's husband thought the card was rather gross and based on his reaction, I had decided to make this cheeky cake for his birthday. 

The three photos on the left were taken with my iPhone as I was making the cake to keep my sister up to date on progress, but I thought that I would include them to show how it was made. Each 'cheek' was made from two 6" round cakes that were about 1.5 to 2 inches high and I used two 9x13" cakes that were about 1 to 1.5" high for the lower back and legs. Prior to carving the cake, I had sketched the general shape out onto freezer paper and used this as a template. I filled and stacked the cakes and placed them in the fridge for the buttercream to harden. I trimmed the general shape of the cheeks and then placed the lower back and legs pieces together with the cheeks. Once it was together, I carved the shape of the cheeks to fit with the body. After I was pleased with the shape, I crumb-coated the whole thing in buttercream and placed it in the fridge to set. 

Now, typically I cover my boards in fondant as it provides a much more finished look to your overall cake. It is a bit of a pet peeve of mine to see an amazingly executed cake on a foil board when I know that cake would have taken many, many hours to make and it would have only been an extra few minutes to cover the board in fondant. In this case, since the cake was a joke for my family, and I hadn't planned to post photos and I wasn't 100% confident it would turn out, I did not cover my board and carved the cake directly on the board. If you were to cover your board in fondant, you would need to cut out a cardboard cake board to the shape of the cake, carve and cover your cake on that, and then carefully transfer the cake to the finished fondant-covered board. 

Once the buttercream was set, it was ready to be covered in flesh-coloured fondant. I have to say that it was quite humourous smoothing the fondant on this cake as I had to use my hands primarily versus a fondant smoother. I used a bulbulous cone modelling tool and dogbone tool to define the cheeks and the legs.

To create some of the hair, I used very fine pieces of brown gumpaste and carefully placed these in the fondant before the fondant dried. As you can see in the picture, due to the difference in temperature between the cold buttercream and the humid July weather, the fondant started to 'sweat' a little (how appropriate). Sweaty fondant is not really a big deal. Just don't touch it and it will dry just fine. 

I used a stitching tool and veining tool for the details on the cutoff jean shorts. I used a bit of dark yellow petal dust to simulate yellow stitching on the jeans. I wish I had purchased a few different shades of blue petal dust to add some more depth to the denim. The frayed edges were made using an extruder and a few different shades of blue.

The rest of the hair was added using brown edible marker. Now from the carving pictures above, I don't need to tell you that the cake wasn't chocolate. Somehow that just seemed like it would be going a bit too far and I was certain that no one would want to eat a chocolate cake if they got past the sight of the external appearance. The cake was vanilla and the swiss meringue buttercream was banana cream flavour.

The cake was quite a surprise. My brother-in-law had guessed that I had made him a basketball-themed cake. He was a good sport about it and we got some memorable photos of the occasion. I feel like I should make some form of butt pun for the end of this post but I shall refrain. My next post should be along shortly as I'm not sure how long I want this to be the first thing people see when visiting my blog!