Clever Cake Studio

This cake was for the Grand Opening party of a local Play’N'Trade store.  They asked that I incoperate a Tetris theme with nods to many of the games and companies that have directly or indirectly supported them.  The little caricatures are the employees.

There are lots of references here to many games and game companies, especially local developers and retro games.  We’ve got a lot of close-up pictures of individual pieces if you’d like to see any in particular.  The list: 5th Cell, ArenaNet, Atari, Batman, Bungie, Donkey Kong, Half-Life, Halo, Mario Brothers, Microsoft Game Studios, Monolith, Mass Effect, Pacman, Penny-Arcade, Scribblenauts, Sony, Square-Enix, Wii, Xbox, and Zelda.

All pieces are made with fondant and hand-painted by myself and my roommate, Dee.  The cake itself is based on the classic Cosmopolitan drink.

Making this cake involved a bit of planning.  There were many sketches done to figure out just how the pieces would lay and their sizes, and which pieces would be what game/company.  Upon being made we laid them out in the cake pan to make adjustments to their fit before being stuck on the fondant-covered cake with a thin water-icing ‘glue’.

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.

This was a cake done for the farewell party of one of my bosses. He had been an absolutely great guy to work for, and was a bigger influence on me than he probably thinks. I’m sad to see him go.

I had asked him what his favorite drink was, pretty out of the blue, with no explanation.  I used it for this creation, which is based on the recipes of a few other food bloggers with only minimal changes.  If you want to try it for yourself, check out this recipe at Erin Cooks to start from, who got it from the book CakeLove.

As I have not drunk Mojitos before, I had to rely on the feedback from him and my coworkers. It got really rave reviews, and I personally really loved it.  This is definitely a keeper.  The cake was moist and rich with flavor, and the Italian buttercream was very light and fluffy and flavorful, not too sweet.  Balanced beautifully.

I also learned that I can make a decent cake even when I’m dead sick from a horrendous cold.  This seems to be making the rounds - starts with a sore throat, followed by days of congestion and yuck and zombified brains and utter exhaustion.  It’s been a week now and I thought I was over it, but its dragging on a bit longer.  Which really is inconvienent, as I’m doing tons of baking this month in preparation for the Punk Rock Flea Market. I’m a bit behind schedule, but will hopefully catch up once my brain starts functioning again.

That’s right - this cake was made for a death-defying, high-flying, seriously kick-ass lady aerialist who performes using long lengths of silk.  If you’ve never seen an aerialist performing, then check out this video from YouTube just to give you an idea.  It’s a cross between dancing and moving sculpture and takes tremendous amount of physical control.  Very cool!

I really enjoyed making this one.  This was commissioned as a surprise by her husband for her birthday, and includes nods to her many interests and accomplishments.  The fondant is marbled white/soft purple.  The top tier is rose cake with strawberry preserves, and the bottom tier is lavender cake with blackberry preserves.

Edit on 5/8/09:  Okay, I got some nice photos from the client, and only now finally got around to uploading them.  That’s going to be a theme for me this week I think.  I changed the top photo because I thought they set it up quite beautifully, and here is a photo of the inside of the top tier rose-strawberry cake, which I did in very vivid colored rainbow swirls.  The bottom tier is also in swirled rainbow, but in more Springtime sort of bright pastels.

My letting and painting skills are slowly improving. But in case you can’t read or tell what all of that is, here you go: “K” for her name; “Ayoo ‘ anoshni!” is I love you in Navaho; “¡Feliz cumpleaños!” is Happy Birthday in Spanish; a medical symbol for her in-progress nursing degree; Bibliophile for her love of reading/writing; a microscope for her degree in microbiology; a rose; a badly done Rock Band drum set; a ball of yarn and knitting needles; two foils for fencing; a “Censored” block; and the line “As you wish” from the Princess Bride movie/book.  Also, I included some sparkling candles as a nod to her (and her husband’s) interest in professional pyrotechnics.

The sculpture I made using sculptey and baked in my oven, so they’d have a keepsake ornament. I used a photo online to guide me, and also had a friend who’s involved in a lot of performance art help make sure I did the ‘rigging’ authentically.  It was a fun little puzzle.

That was done one evening, the baking another, and the layering, construction and decoration was all done on Saturday. We had a bunch of friends over that day to play board/card games, which meant I had an audience for this (as well as the occasional sounding board or helper willing to spend a half hour rolling out little balls of fondant for me).  That’s why there’s a picture of me working on the cake - one of our friends picked up the camera and caught me.   It’s just more proof of how very glamourous this work is.  ;P

This was a really adorable cake to do.  I did the baking one night, then did everything else the next night.

I actually couldn’t find my red dye.  At all.  I was running low anyhow, but I knew I still had some, and had seen the bottle when I was baking the cake.  But now… it disappeared!  Elves took it.  Darn elves.  I had a half-full can of spray dye, and with that and some orange and brown, managed to get the color fox-like enough.  I really wanted a more vibrant, almost cartoony fox, but this earthy look works.

The problem with cute animal cakes is that, at some point, you have to cut then open to eat the deliciousness inside.  And this one is carrot cake, really rich and full of carroty goodness.  I tried shredding carrots myself, and two battle wounds later, I gave up and my husband went out and bought me the pre-shredded variety.  :)  Layering this carrot cake is a nice creamy chai buttercream.

I always learn a lot with each cake I do, and this was no exception.  It was by far much more successful in terms of carving - It was a clean carve, stayed together, was very pleasant.  I made mistakes in the fondant itself, by rolling it a bit too thin so it was prone to tear in tricky spots.  I also wish I had left the white area alone, but kept fussing with it and adding texture/color.  Oh well!  Bake and learn.

This is the last of this year’s Valentine’s Day mini-cakes.  It was very enjoyable to make, as I find pouring ganache to be rather fun as I’ve gotten the hang of the consistency and the pouring finesse.

This has pomegranate cake with lemon curd filling, and a dark chocolate ganache.  If you have not tried the combination of pomegranate and lemon, I highly recommend it!  To get the pomegranate flavor, I first tried just a flavor oil, but I didn’t like it very much.  I ended up using a mix of pomegranet juice, grenadine, and lemon juice to get the flavor that tasted right to me.  It ended up being a rather lovely neutral color.

After layering and filling the cake, I did a thin crumb-coat using the lemon curd.  This is to seal the crumbs and also to prevent the chocolate ganache from absorbing into the cake.  Much cleaner and smoother result this way.

There is generally two consistencies of ganache.  A 1:1 ratio of chocolate to heavy cream gives you a smoothly flowing chocolate that is great for fondue and pouring over cake.  When cooled, it forms a soft ’shell’. You can also whip this ganache into a spreadable chocolate frosting.

A 2:1 ratio of chocolate to cream gives you a chocolate that will harden when cooled, so it’s great for dipping strawberries or making candy.

The fondant and the little red beads along the bottom are made of fondant.  I liked the simplicity of this cake, it really felt romantic and sweet.

This was an especially sweet cake to do.  It was a Valentine’s cake for a couple friends of mine.  I had to build a custom box for it so the roses wouldn’t be damaged!  These are the client’s photographs, as I was running late that morning and forgot to take pictures.

The flavors in this cake are unusual and very worth noting.  The client chose a simple mint cake, with Frangelico’s buttercream.  This combination (which would probably be good as a mixed drink!) was both refreshing and rich at the same time.

The roses are made of sugarpaste and dusted with gold luster.  The heart is fondant.

This is the second of the two cakes shipped to New York.  These are the client’s photographs, so this is how they looked upon arrival.

This cake was a present for some friends of the client who were recently engaged.  The table and balls are inside jokes about how they had met.

The balls are sugarpaste, painted in edible gold.  The table was hand-painted, and was unfortunately a bit smudged in the travel.  It’s rich chocolate cake with Frangelico’s buttercream, covered in the fondant I made myself.