or

"Hey, I can do that!"


Sunday, May 23, 2010

LOST Finale!

LOST Series Finale Cake
(+5 skill points => 335/400)


My husband and I attended a LOST finale episode get-together this evening.  We had a mini-junk food fest that ended with this peanut butter chocolate cake.  The finale was a little disappointing ... thankfully the cake was good ;)
Stats:
  • 8" round Duncan Hines Devil's Food cake mix (I thought "Devil" was appropriate considering the show)
  • coated with semi-sweet chocolate ganache
  • iced and filled with peanut butter chocolate IMBC
  • topped with cocoa using a stencil
  • shell and reverse shell borders
The grocery store was out of the Duncan Hines Dark Chocolate Fudge cake mix, which is my norm for chocolate cakes.  The Devil's Food cake performed adequately, though.  Now I'm not even sure how they taste different.  It was a little on the dry side, but it could be because I hadn't frozen this cake before hand.

It's been a while since I've used ganache to ice an entire cake.  I was being lazy and a bit rushed, so I wasn't very vigilante in making it correctly.  There were several chunks of chocolate chips that didn't get melted completely.  Meh, it wasn't for looks anyway.


    Since this cake was basically for me and my buddies, I got to choose the flavors.  I've been wanting to retry the peanut butter chocolate Italian meringue buttercream for a while now!  It was yummy.


    My hubby and I have been working a lot of overtime lately.  There wasn't many hours left in the weekend for me to spend on decorating cake, so I opted to make a stencil using my Cricut.  I asked people on the cakecentral.com forums for LOST cake ideas and several suggested to recreate the DHARMA logo.  The net has several LOST cakes that feature this, and it was a great idea for something simple and quick.


    I downloaded a LOST font and modified some of the characters to make my stencil using SCAL.

    http://www.dafont.com/lost-font.font
    http://shinymetalobjects.net/cake/LOST.scut2

    My first attempt consisted of using the stencil on the cake with the leftover ganache and that ended up to be a fail.  I didn't let the iced cake firm up hard enough in the freezer, so the stencil stuck to the icing and smudged it.  The ganache wasn't thin enough to really fill in the details of the stencil.  I, uh, lost the "LOST" in the middle completely.  I ended up scraping it all off and starting over.

    This time I used a technique detailed in Toba Garrett's book The Well-Decorated Cake.  She sifted cocoa powder over a stencil to recreate an image.  This worked pretty well for my first shot.


    Unfortunately I didn't take the time to make bridges in my stencil.  The stencil was actually 3 pieces placed together on the top of the cake, so some cocoa powder fell on to the negative space as I was trying to lift each piece off off.  I also accidentally threw away the center of the "O" when I was making the stencil, so you can see it's completely filled in with powder.  It was really great to finally get to try this technique and it saved me some time rather than trying to figure out how to re-do things.


    I was pretty pleased with how this casual cake turned out and its taste.  It even looked pretty sliced.  We had a great time re-capping and watching the end of LOST!  Some day I'll actually go back and watch all of the episodes I had missed.

    No comments:

    Post a Comment

    As Seen On

    As Seen On Capital Confectioners