Clever Cake Studio

Sorry that it’s been awhile!  I’ve got several cakes lined up in the months ahead, so I’ll be posting more often.  To kick it off, this is a cake I made for my husband’s 28th birthday.  I was inspired by several steampunk and fantasy flying ships, including one of my favorites from the movie ‘The Adventures of Baron von Munchausen.’  This top photos is a little cheesy because it’s the cliched background-removed (by someone with meager photo editing skills), but I really wanted you to see the cake as a whole, and not all the party people and kitchen in the background.

This is two cakes stacked - the bottom is a chocolate cake layered with cherries, and the second is a lemon cake layered with lemon curd-buttercream, and fresh blueberries.  I used many supports and had some carboard between those layers, so that when it came time to cut, I was able to very easily slide a long, wide, flat spatula just under that cardboard, and then lift off the whole top cake and set it on it’s own tray for cutting.  I hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but the audience I ended up having while I was doing made a lot of appreciative noice.   There was also a lot of happy reactions to the taste of the cake itself, which, to me, is paramount - I will always see flaws in my artistic work because I’m constantly trying to improve… but I like the recipes I use, and work with really quality ingrediants, so it means more to me that people love to eat it than look at it.

All the fondant decorations are done by hand.  Every individual board, since I wanted to mix shades of brown for a more realistic look, was laid one by one.  There were advantages to doing it that way rather than finding a fondant-stamping sheet (you roll out your fontant onto the sheet, on press it on afterwards, and it can imprint its design), though a sheet would have been much faster.  Had I more time, I would have added even more - because it’s the details that matter.  Like adding crates and barrels, nets and ropes, anchors, bags, bottles, whatever.  Signs of life and activity aboard this fantasy ship.  I want to do a more elaborate and more technological airship as a display cake, and I’ll go all out on all those tiny details then.

I used lots of dust for this one, both matte and luster.  That’s really what made it look fun to me.  Making the dust into a paint would have been a much more dramatic metallic, but I was fine with this softer, fantasy look.  There’s even edible glitter in the clouds, which didn’t really photograph (I also, when I was all done, put some extra glitter on one of my black cats because she was being a butt).

Clouds, by the way, are a pain.  I had used a meringue buttercream because it would be light, since it was really just there for decoration and then would get sloughed off.  But it doesn’t hold shapes as well as a standard buttercream, and I didn’t realize how picky I’d be about the way they looked.  I finally forced myself to leave them be and move on.  Next time, there will be much prettier clouds!  It’s all in the details, right?

Here is the concept sketch.  I usually just doodle something out a few times depending on how comfortable I need to be with the design.  The fox cake, for example, I spent much longer drawing out from various angles until I felt comfortable enough with the shape to go at it in carved-cake form.

This final photo was taken by a friend of mine, after the balloons were removed for safety and some candles lit up.  If other people at the part submit some photos that are good, I’ll probably also post them as well.