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)

Beat Up Car Cake

My little brother has managed to run two cars into the ground before his 18th birthday but for his 17th birthday I mad him this cake representing the beat up second car he got from his friend. It looks a lot nicer now but it drives about as well as my cake LOL

I started with 2 layers of delicious chocolate cake these are 8in rounds but it would have been better if they were bigger. I cut them in half and decided I didn't need the 4th half when I was 'gluing' the cakes to the board. I carved out the front and back windshields.

I put a very heavy crumb coat over the whole thing, this may even be a second coat as I usually double coat my chocolate cakes because of the crumbs.

 

Then came the colored details. I put down the black for windshields first, attached my doughnut wheels next, then went in with the red coating most of the car but leaving the hood and back bumper to be done in gray. This doesn't look like the nicest car but I did it because that's what his car looked like at the time.

Then it was just little car details. I added a thick red icing spoiler to the back, some head lights for the front and back, and a little Ford logo on the front. I used a knife to make etchings in the solid buttercream to give the windows and hood more dimension.



He loved his cake and it lasted only slightly less long then the car did ^.~

Pegasus Cake with Meringue Wings

Unicorn cakes are all the rage right now but my mother is a fan of pegasus not unicorns so for her birthday I wanted to make a pegasus cake and I found a great reference picture that did this with meringue wings.

So to start I had to try out the meringue wings. I traced some wings on to a piece of paper and put that under some wax paper. when my meringue was ready I put it into a piping back with a leaf tip. Starting with the longest bottom feathers I worked my way up the wing feather by feather. As I pulled away from each feather it pulled up a little but this adds some dimension to the wings that I liked. I finished the tops with some rosette swirls and baked them on 275 for over an hour.

I had lots of extra meringue so I piped it out into swirls to add to my cake as part of the mane later.

Next came the cake. My mum's favorite is angel food so I actually bought them from the store and let me say that getting them out of those containers in one piece was a challenge. I carved them down into a cylinder and filled the center with strawberries and cream. I gave the whole thing a crumb coat in a Chantilly frosting

For the final coat I used straight whipped cream for a pure white appearance.

I did a little experimenting with the ears trying to dip them after cutting (left) or cut them after the white chocolate had set just a little (right). The cutting after the coat had set was definitely a cleaner look and is now my go to but you have to make sure the white chocolate isn't too hard or it'll chip right off your strawberry when you cut it.

This is the point I got to before I ran out of green buttercream. These cakes always take more icing then I think they will for the hair and since I had no time to go out for more ingredients (and dye) I had to improvise and use my whipped cream to make more green for swirls. It wasn't near as dark and the line is very visible from the top.







My mom loved it and she didn't even notice the flaws although she did remind me that she hates whipped cream (but loves chantilly....so....yeah)

Another successful cake from last year. Wonder what I'll do for her this year....

Wolverine Cake

Here's another cake from last year. I was commissioned to do a wolverine cake for a friend's son. After talking with the mom about the cake she wanted I came up with this sketch. He likes wolverine but being a classy kid he likes the old wolverine style so I looked up his costume to refresh my memory and came up with this bust style cake. I like this style and it's not something I see a lot of other bakers doing but with cartoon characters it's actually pretty simple.

 I started with he mask  which was made from fondant. I made a paper stencil by tracing his mask shape off a very enlarged photo on my computer. Then cut that out of some black fondant, I like to buy my fondant already colored for black as it is usually darker then I could get it on my own and a lot less work. I put this mask to dry on a cocoa powder can which I determined would be about the same size as my 4in cake I would eventually put it on. I made this a day or two in advance so it would have time to fully dry.

I baked my cakes the day before and let them cool in the freezer overnight. The day of the party I iced my cakes in yellow buttercream. I gave the top cake a little rounded dome since heads tend to be round. I put some of my other icing details on my cakes before stacking them.

Then I added my fondant details which was only the mask and belt.


Finished it up with a few more black icing details to really tie the whole thing together.


I really liked how close to my original drawing this one came out and I know the kid loved it.

White Chocolate Birch Bark Wedding Cake

So this is a cake I worked on last year for my dear friend Beau's wedding. I always start custom cakes by sitting down with the clients and making a sketch with them. I find out what the client wants and (hopefully) represent what the final product will look like. This way I'm sure we are all on the same page. Beau and Elizabeth were having a more rustic wedding in the cold of a Colorado February and wanted a birch wedding cake.

They didn't like fondant so I offered to do the birch effect with chocolate. I practiced it a few times but the technique is pretty simple. You just melt a small amount of dark chocolate and paint different lines onto a piece of parchment. You could put this in the fridge if you don't want any smearing but I felt the mixing effect would add to the realism. Next you melt a bunch of white chocolate and drizzle it heavily over the lines. Spread the while chocolate with even spatula strokes and if you work side to side with the lines the graying effect looks really good.

These cakes were gluten free chocolate and I filled them with fresh strawberries and iced them in a chantilly frosting (which is really just fancy talk for adding whipped cream and almond extract to your cream cheese icing). I always crumb coat specialty cakes but with chocolate ones it's extra important.

It took up my WHOLE fridge! You can't see it but the top shelf was taken up by all the pans of chocolate. I really couldn't do a larger cake without a bigger kitchen.





This cake was going to Silverthorn so I thought it wise to transport in an unstacked format with zero decoration. I showed up to the event hall a couple hours before the wedding and worked in the kitchen assembling the cake. Stacking went smoothly and it didn't matter so much what the underneath cake looked like (so I forgot to get a picture). I pulled out all my chocolate pieces which I had pre-cut, I felt the strait lines of cutting made for better trees then trying to break the chocolate into right sized pieces. I went around the cake starting at the top putting chocolate piece after chocolate piece. There was a scary moment when I thought they might not make it but they did and the effect was just right. I added little buttercream pine cones but there were no extra flowers to add, the last thing was the topper which I added right before presenting.

It was a great time with great people and I was even there to cut the cake ^^

It's Gingerbread Time Again!!

Once again it's been a whole year with no posts about my crafts but it's one of my New Years resolutions to be better about that this year so I'll be posting several of my projects from the past couple years that I've saved pictures for and working on several new projects this year ^^


For this year I have a brand new gingerbread house!! With the help of my long suffering friend Ileana we created a gingerbread Grand Overlook Hotel complete with rice crispy hedge maze and little frozen Jack.

 As always I started by pulling a bunch of reference photos. This is when I realized that the Stanley hotel here in Colorado (which I've never actually visited) was not the hotel in the movie it's merely the inspiration for the novel. So with this new knowledge I pulled several movie shots and some pictures of the Timberline Lodge in Oregon where the movie was filmed. I also managed to find this 3D model of the hotel which was very useful in helping me create my pattern pieces.

 Last year I found that my card stock patterns didn't fit together nearly as well once baked out of gingerbread because I hadn't accounted for the thickness. So this year I decided to make my model out of cardboard to better simulate the gingerbread. I created a plan of all the pieces I thought I'd need and started my model with the left wing wall setting the scale for the rest. I made the rest of the left wing pieces to a scale that looked right based on pictures. The right wing was a little smaller so I cut an inch off height, no parapet outcrops but I used the same roof pattern for it's own little roof outcrops. The last thing I built was the middle stating with a cardboard place holder for the floor which I used as is in the final building. After my model was complete I took apart the pieces and sprayed them with a canvas coating to help seal the cardboard from the grease of the cookie dough.










 Next there was a whole night of baking and cutting, cooling and sorting. The next morning we started assembly. For this project I had the idea of doing a bunch of line piping to give the building the appearance of paneling, I also though this would be best done while they were flat. That took some time to dry completely and so we assembled other pieces to dry while we waited.

 We got to about here in assembly when we realized the back walls were too low and that the right center roof panel didn't fit at all. We did a little re-baking and cut our roof panel on the fly while it cooled.

 It was all going so well until the Necco Wafers ran out....we called a bunch of stores but in the end the only place we could find the chocolate Necco's was at FizzyWigs. We called it a night till we could go out to the store for more. We bought a total of 16 tubes and in the end we still finished the last panel with nothing but broken scrap.

 
It was worth it though, and with a final few hours of decorating.

And the hour Ileana spent putting the maze together. We had an AMAZING (haunted) gingerbread hotel.

Which Bob was nice enough to take off my hands for his Messiah party which meant it actually got eaten and enjoyed ^^

Another Year and Another Gingerbread House

    So it's been a whole year since I wrote a blog post about any of the craft things I've been doing, and I have been quite crafty this year. My friend and I started our own business selling up-cycled thrift store duds and we even got our own booth at the Denver Punk Rock Flea Market this December. It took a whole year to get all the product together to sell and in the end while it was really exciting I missed out on other things I wanted to be doing this year so going forward there will be less work done but more pictures, which is way more important ^^ don't you agree?

   This post is about my yearly gingerbread house though. This year I chose my inspiration as a tribute to a life long friend of mine Bob, he has run the Boulder Messiah for 34 years! Conducting 3 shows in one weekend every Christmas. It is through his passion for Messiah and years of time and money that this year was his 100th Messiah!!!!! In tribute to this amazing tradition that I have personally been a part of for 27 years I drew my gingerbread inspiration from the church we hold it in every year St. John's Episcopal in Boulder.
   Over several days I looked at pictures of the church from all angles to design a gingerbread pattern. Then I decided on my dimensions for my church mostly determined by the height and width of the card stock paper I was using. This is what all the pieces laid out (approximating the building profile) look like.

    I laminated this and used it to cut out all the pieces of gingerbread I used to create my gingerbread tribute to St. John's. It took almost 20 hours over two days to cut out and bake the 30 or so pieces used to make this yet to be decorated version.
   Lots of people ask me what the windows are made of. The answer is that I broke up jolly ranchers into fairly large pieces and sprinkled them into the holes. It's best to only do this if your gingerbread is on a parchment paper baking so the sugar doesn't stick but to be honest I still lost several windows and next time I think I'll cut the windows bigger and put bigger pieces in them, perhaps even whole jolly ranchers.

It took another 8-10 hours to get the supplies and decorate this rough, plain looking gingerbread house into an edible masterpiece that I presented to Bob at the intermission of his 101st show.