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 ^^