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Sunday, September 6, 2009

House Warming Cake: Completed

House Warming Cake
(+5 skill points -> 115/400)


In a previous post were the design plans for this cake. Overall we had some hits and some misses. Here's the play by play.

I baked a vanilla box cake on Thursday night and stuck it in the freezer. The next day, I didn't know that I should thaw the cake before working with it. It was too hard to tort it with my nifty cake leveler, so I used a serrated knife and sawed away. I'm not so good at torting with a knife ... which is why I bought the leveler ... I ended up slicing my left hand a little. Oh well, it turned out good enough.


The filling was cream cheese tub frosting. Can't go wrong with that.


Now for some really green buttercream. This was the regular Wilton recipe plus a combination of cheap liquid food coloring and a smidge of gel food coloring. Icing it was nice because it's a round cake!

The stack of cake boards I bought are way too big for an 8" cake, but I was too lazy to trim it. That made shoving it in my plastic cake storage thingie difficult.

Next came making the fondant fence posts. I rolled out some marshmallow fondant and cut them into 2" x 1/4" strips. I used a heavy duty super sharp pizza cutter and a wooden ruler. I smoothed out some rough edges afterward with my finger tips.



Earlier in the week I had tinted and rolled out MMF for the welcome mat. To do the outlines, I made a small batch of royal icing and tinted it black. I thought would have to use a lot of the gel coloring but it turned out a little went a long way. Maybe it's just easier to color royal icing instead of a big batch of buttercream.


Here's the inspiration and the template I made for the welcome mat:


I printed out the template and put it under the brown fondant. Those went on top of my makeshift light box (plastic bin, small lamp, unused glass door from our entertainment center). I think I used a #3 tip to pipe out the outlines. It went well! In order to get smooth lines, I used some of the stringwork piping techniques and didn't allow the icing to touch down until the last second.



I iced the cake with the green buttercream. I marked 2 lines on the side of the cake where I wanted the fence posts to connect to. Piping short sections of white royal icing, I worked quickly to get my fence posts stuck on to the cake. There's an uncovered section that's the "front" of the cake. The fence ended with 2 larger posts to simulate a walkway entrance.


Tip #233 was used to make grass on the top of the cake so it could look like a lawn. I've never used this tip before so it took a few practice shots to get the height I wanted. This seemed to take forever and I didn't even do the entire top!


Plop! The welcome mat is centered in the middle. I added more grass where I had missed before. Please ignore that nobody actually puts their welcome mat on their front lawn ;)


I wanted to add a bunch of little flowers around the cake to pretty it up, but that ended up being a fail. I couldn't find the right drop flower tip that I wanted. When I got it, the royal icing was way too thin. My flower melted into the grass! I made some leaves from the leftover buttercream to try and redeem myself.




My family enjoyed the cake. House warming cake: complete!

Fails:
  • I should have thawed out the cake, still in its plastic wrap, thoroughly before working with it
  • trimming the cake board is still important
  • I suck at making flowers
FTWs:
  • round cakes are so much easier to ice than square ones
  • makeshift light box will help me in many projects to come
  • line piping with royal icing went well
  • I now have experience with using tip #233

2 comments:

  1. Why did u say that u sould have let the cake defrost before unwrapping? Is it because it dries it out? Just wondering b/c I had a similar situation with a cake I made last night. I wanted to carve but did not want to do it on a soft cake. I did it while it was frozen... I hope the cake was not dry for my friend.
    Let me know
    erilay on CC

    ReplyDelete

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