Clever Cake Studio

My first attempt at a corset cake came with many learnings. I shall share these with you, so that we may better the world together by bringing forth greater sexy cakes.

First of all, don’t use a soft cake recipe or a cake mix for a cake that needs to hold its shape. Even if it’s not very tall and doesn’t have a lot to support, you should really stick with a recipe that’s between cake and pound cake, with a fine crumb (texture). Because fondant is heavy, and soft cakes just aren’t made for it.

Secondly, I envy those of you with air conditioning. Even with a bunch of fans blowing around, I realized very quickly that trying to decorate a cake in the heat of summer is a very unpleasant experience. The fondant is softer (which makes it easier to work with, but then it wasn’t holding it’s ‘pinstrip’ look as well).

You can look at the original shape of the cake with only the crumb-coat right here compared to the completed cake at top, and you may notice how much bigger the boobs used to be. That poor torso went from a D to an A-cup, due to these two problems. Likely just having the better cake recipe would have helped tremendously. I also might consider doing the fondant over the boobs separately to get the shape just right. It’s an idea, anyhow. I plan on doing another corset cake in the future, and hope that it will have a whole lot more outrageous va-VOOM to it

So anyhow. I wanted to really make this feel 3D, as a lot of corset cakes I’ve seen tend to be rather boxy and the front is too flat. I added an extra strip down the stomach to carve into a more realistic shape and was really happy with it, as well as the curve of the hips and how well the fondant hugged them. Really, the boobs are the main thing I’m disappointed about.  Just wait till next time… I’ll have enough scheming for it.

The painting (done in this photo by Pip, who was helping me that day) is just food coloring and water, which leaves it shiny and tacky. This is where having a food-grade airbrush would be kinda awesome, but ohwell. I work with what I have. I get tools slowly. This time, I got a roller that let me do this pinstrip effect. You’ll want to press deeply, because of how it flattens a bit when painted.

This little fella was for a young man’s birthday. It’s a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting. For a tastier result, I used marzipan (a sweet almond paste) rather than fondant for the scales, which were just individually shaped by hand and applied. You can get a more refined look by rolling out and cookie-cutting smaller circles, but I didn’t mind the more imperfect cartoony look for this one. I made little wings as well, probably the only thing distinguishing it from a dinosaur. The eyes and claws are fondant, simply because I wanted them to be very white, and marzipan is that light beige-almond color.

I brushed on silver luster dust to give it that fantasy shimmery look. If you mix luster dust with a tiny bit of grain alcohol, you get an edible metallic paint, which would be another way to go for a bigger wow.