Cake Creativity!

For the past 6 months or so, I've been trying to embrace my artistic, creative side so the need to come up with a cake for Sadie's Birthday party inspired me to try it out!  I'm not a big sweets person so I've never been too interested in doing much baking but the artistic aspect of decorating a cake sounded really fun (and intimidating) to me.  A couple friends had recently started making fondant covered cakes and gave me some tips, blog links, and encouragement.  

I tried a dry run with just fondant and no cake and then decided to make a cake for my mother-in-law's birthday which was simple but turned out pretty well. 

The cake for Chris' mom

So, I took on the owl cake I really wanted for Sadie's party and with a bit of trepidation, put it together quite successfully! It was definitely time consuming and though I enjoyed it, I don't know if I'll make another one before Ella's birthday :-)

So, I started with this marshmallow fondant recipe. The first time I made it I used my hand mixer and broke it :-(  DEFINITELY use a stand mixer for this.  I finally bought one after 10 years of wanting one!!

This is the lump of fondant post-mixing, it's SUPER easy and the ingredients cost less than $5

 

I made the cake earlier in the day so it had plenty of time to cool.  I watched youtube videos to learn how to cut and ice and stack the cakes.  It was pretty easy.  And it doesn't matter what it looks like cause it's all getting covered :-)  The "experts" say to use a thin coat of icing but I used more because I know people like the taste of buttercream icing more than the fondant so I wanted there to be adequate icing under the "pretty" fondant.

To cover the cake roll out a huge piece of fondant.  Both times I did it, I had trouble making it large enough to drape easily but keeping it thick enough to not rip when I picked it up.  

Tips: 

-use tons of extra powdered sugar to keep it from sticking, it's not hard to add water or crisco to reconstitute it if it gets too dry

-roll it out some, then flip and roll on that side, then flip and so forth.  I tried just rolling out the perfect size with out turning it over many times and the rolling warmed the fondant so much it got sticky and would rip when I tried to roll it up to put it on the cake.  UBER frustrating.  It actually took me 4-5 tries to get it rolled out and on the cake.  

-if it's humid or hot in the kitchen, put on a fan to keep the fondant cool.  I figured this out after about round 4 of the fondant sticking to the mat/counter (I tried both) and it helped a lot

-buy a special fondant rolling pin.  I used a regular one we had and it isn't long enough to do the job really well, definitely buying one of those for next time

 

Youtube videos were also helpful for this step.  You basically roll the large peice on fondant onto your rolling pin and then unroll it on the cake.  Use a smoothing tool (looks like a little plastic iron) and then I used a paring knife to cut off the excess.  Whew! This is the hardest part by far! Any big imperfections I just covered with decorations :-)

Make sure you leave some chunks of various sizes to color for your decorations.  I drew a picture of the design I wanted to make labeled with colors I'd need and approximately how much of each so I could color the "chunks" accordingly. I used gel food coloring from almart and it was really easy to just knead the color into the fondant.  Ella helped make a lot of the colors :-)

Now the fun part! For the decorations I got creative and used knives, playdoh tools, cookie cutters, wine glasses, and bowls to cut shapes.  Chris was good at helping me find the thing in our kitchen that was the perfect shape for what I needed :-)  

 

Tips: 

-you can make some things in large batches (like these leaves) but they'll start to dry out a little bit while they sit around waiting to go on the cake and become a little less maleable.  This was fine for the leaves I used for a border on the owl cake but it would have made other things tough.  For instance, I wanted the  branch the owl sits on to drape over the sides of the cake so I needed it to be super soft and maleable to drape nicely over the sides so I put it on as soon as I cut it out.

-put the cake on whatever you want to serve it on as soon as you stack and ice it. You do NOT want to move this thing after you painstakingly perfect all your details!

 

Per a tip I saw online, I used a paintbrush and water to help the fondant peices adhere to the cake.  It worked really well and was super easy to get them to stick.

Finished Product!

 

Me, finally done, messy, exhausted.  The time from starting to make the fondant until finished was about 4-5 hours.  And that's with the cake already made and iced and chilled earlier in the day. I'm sure with more experience I'll get faster but I must say, I'm very happy with how it turned out :-)