Mad Hatter Cake

Every year for my birthday I enter the Sweet Times of the Rockies cake show and last year I won second place with this Mad Hatter cake! Now you may recognize it as a cake I did on my first attempt at entering a competition, that one didn’t turn out nearly as well and I definitely didn’t win anything at that one but I learned from it and my second try looks way better, right?

Well to start this is a foam cake, most of my competition pieces are because they stay nicer and keep better in the long run. So I shaved down my foam block so it was round and tapered to a smaller round towards the bottom, then I iced it with buttercream. I let the cake chill in the freezer so the icing would harden before I coated it in fondant.

When coating something that gets smaller at the bottom I find it near impossible to do it with no wrinkles which is what happened in this case but I don’t let it bother me. When things don’t go quite to plan it’s a great time to employ a classic cake decorating trick and hide the defects in this case with a dusty pink hat band. Before I put on the hat band I find it much easier to make my hat brim directly on the cake board and then set the hat cake on top of it. The turns in the brim have to be made before the fondant has a chance to dry. Then I added some gold detailing to give the hat more of a texture using a stencil and a dry gold powder called luster dust.

Only after all that is done could I wrap my hat band around my cake. I also made a cool broach to go over where the band crisscrosses in the back and to cover a rather large tear in the fondant there.

I let the hat dry in front of a fan over night while I moved onto the details I would be adding to the cake. The biggest of these detail pieces was the tea pot and cup which I formed out of rice krispy and coated with several layers of fondant to get them as smooth as porcelain. I let spouts and handles dry completely before I attached them to the china using a bit of royal icing.

Next came the painting which I used blue food coloring and a very tiny paint brush to achieve. I wanted to add a pattern to the pot and cup to give them a more realistic look and bring them together as a set. I chose simple lines and dots so I could easily replicate it over and over but for the shapes that would pull my pattern together I used tiny cookie cutters which I dipped in my blue color before gently pressing them into the fondant. This technique wasn't perfect and I had to go over my lines with a brush to make them more solid but in the end I feel I ended up with a fairly good looking, continuous pattern on both pieces.

There was also orange hair pieces to make which I did by rolling my fondant very thin, cutting strips out of it, and wrapping them around big and normal sized straws. There was also a broach and hat pins to be made which I used different molds to create and put together the pieces using royal icing. To make the hat pin's sticks I rolled out fondant very thin and aloud it to dry but this was a mistake and when I tried to attach them to the cake at the end all the sticks broke and I had to piece them together which didn't give them nearly the height I was going for, next time I'm going to use tiny stir straws as my sticks. There was also a burnt card to be made which I hand cut out of fondant and then painted with black and brown food color to give it the burnt look. I believe it's really the details that bring a cake from 'ok' to 'amazing' and I spent a lot of time putting mine together.

When it came time to attach my details to the cake I used royal icing for my glue. The hat band was too tight and already dry so the card just had to sit on top. My tea pot I really wanted to make pouring tea into the cup so I used some extra fondant in a wedge to prop up the back and put the pot on an angle. I took time and a long straw to create a towering 'pour' flowing into the tea cup but the illusion didn't quite work. I used green buttercream with a leaf tip to create some grass under the tea pot, hiding the fondant wedge, which I stuck molded fondant roses into. My last details were the hat pins which I attached on sight using a straw to poke a hole down through the cake and royal icing to hold it there, as I said my sticks broke several times and I had to simply glue the pins to the side of the cake in the end.

There are always things I would change and do differently when it's my art but this cake won we second place in the Sweet Times of the Rockies cake show and I'm very proud of it. Thanks for taking the time to read about my awesome cake adventures ^^

Gingerbread Tardis

I missed posting about this years gingerbread house! As per usual I made another amazing gingerbread creation this year but I scaled down from last year and technically I recycled an old gingerbread house from 2014 but I had to make a whole new pattern for it. So take 2 on the gingerbread Tardis, it went better than the first time, turned out cleaner, pattern still needs some adjustments but I like it.

I started by making a plan, using my old pattern I determined all the pieces I would need to construct my tardis. Three walls, 2 doors, a base, corner strips, and outer panel pieces to complete the look. The changes I made from last time include making everything bigger and doing 2 thick pieces on top instead of  4 triangular topper pieces, lastly I had to correct a major error from my last pattern and make sure I had top strips my “Police Box” banners could hang on without interfering with the doors. The next step is making a card stock paper pattern. Now I’ve learned from the past to coat my pieces in a plastic cover but unfortunately I’ve been too busy opening my own business this year and didn’t have time to coat these pieces. As you can probably tell that lead to them getting a bit greasy.

Some other changes I made were cutting out the side panels and corner strips from fondant instead of cookie dough. I did this as a last minute change but the thought process behind it was that the fondant doesn’t expand or change shape due to baking and I figured it would give me cleaner lines. I also made the “Police Box” strips and phone door out of fondant. The structural pieces were all made out of a dyed sugar cookie dough with no baking soda and lots of extra flour. Last time I made my tardis out of a proper gingerbread dough with all the spices but it turned green when it baked and left me with an aqua colored tardis, not good. I also chose to hot melt glue my structure together rather than use royal icing because it dries faster and it was for display only. I did use royal icing to attach all the exterior pieces  which was my next step. You’ll notice that my last minute decision to change the exterior to fondant pieces has made my whole design not quite fit so it will need more reworking at some point. The panel pieces are all one so I used card stock to lift them into place after applying the royal over the window areas and down the sides and middle.

I made the fondant pieces (and baked the cookie pieces) a day ahead of assembly so they would have time to dry. In addition to the side panels and “Police Box” banners I also made a topper light and a phone door. One of these days I’ll actually make the top light up but it was not this time.







My last step was to add fun holiday decorations. The snow is all buttercream and the icicles are royal icing. I used a clay exctruder to make a perfectly even light string attaching it with royal and the lights themselves are chocolate sixlet candies attached with black royal icing. I added icicles to the light strings to add some realism and depth and covered the whole thing in a think coating of powdered sugar. There it is, my second attempt at a gingerbread tardis.

Turkey Cake

So I started teaching classes last year and it has been a learning process but enjoyable every step of the way. Some of them are simple like Cake 101 where you learn to stack, frost, and fondant your own cake but others are more complicated like my turkey cake class. I taught this one right before thanksgiving and everyone had an awesome cake to brighten their celebration ^^ The class was a huge success and now I’m gonna lay out how I did it so you too can learn how but nothing is as good as in person instruction so I highly recommend taking one of my classes.

To start I carve the cake into a dome (in this case a foam one for display purposes) using a small knife at a 45 degree angle I went all the way around the top of the cake in a circle, then I made more cuts at various angels to round out the top. Next I took 2 rice krispy treats and formed each into a drumstick shape. I put those drumsticks on each side of your cake, a little towards the back with the skinny sides pointing towards each other. I iced the whole thing with buttercream, an offset spatula, and a lot of patience, after half an hour or so it looked like this. I put it in the freezer to harden up while I worked on the knife.

The knife is made out of fondant but I added some gum paste to it to dry it out faster. I also had to do the knife twice because the first one cracked and broke when I tried to put it into the cake. This is a picture of the first one but for the second I folded in a small straw to give it added stability. The blade can be any size you want but have the straw all the way at the fat end of the blade to insert your handle into. The handle was just hand formed with a toothpick inserted into it so you can attach it to the blade.

Next I covered the whole thing in brown fondant using my hands to smooth it out and get into all the little crevices, cut around the bottom to get rid of all the excess. Use your finger to divide your turkey breast into 2 sections for some added realism. You’ll want to save that extra brown to make a couple of wings which I just hand formed and with some trial and error ended up with a good shape then used some fondant shaping tools to do the feathered bits. I glued them onto my cake with a little frosting. I also made some bone ends with white fondant and the same tools. I cut slices into the skinny ends of my drumsticks and attached my bones to them.

The next step was to use brown food coloring and water to create a nice golden brown, shiny, and crispy looking skin. I used a paintbrush to paint a line of the brown food coloring right down the middle of the divide. Then I switched to water and painted that color down the sides of the cake. I used more brown in all the joins and then water to bring the color around the rest of the cake creating a gradient  over the whole thing and giving it a shiny coating. I also cut a wedge into the back for the stuffing to come out of.

The last bit was to make the stuffing which was just piled up icing with gram cracker crumbs stuck to it. I made some small green peas and orange carrots out of fondant to stick into the stuffing. I cut a skinny wedge section out of the top of one breast of my turkey cake to insert the knife into but I let it dry for 2 days first. I painted it with silver luster dust and vodka after I put it into the cake but you can do it beforehand. The end result was a fantastically realistic looking turkey which I was proud to teach a class on. It took my students about 3 hours to make the cake and then I sent them home with the knifes to insert into the cake as they saw fit ^^ I even had one very creative student who made a rotten turkey with a rat coming out of it (my personal favorite)