Week #37 – Cincinnati Bengals Birthday Cake

October 8, 2012 by

My friend Josh loves his home team, the Cincinnati Bengals. His lovely wife Suzanne asked if I would make a cake using them as inspiration.

I recently took a class with the fabulous Greggy Soriano who taught me some really great painting effects.  I decided to put those new skills into practice by painting faux bois and hand painting the tiger stripes. I also finally got to use my grass tip to make royal icing grass at the base of the cake.

The cake looked great at the table with Suzanne’s amazing beer cake that actually had beer in it!

I topped the cake off with a black banner to hide some of my smudges.

The cake was vanilla with salted caramel buttercream and covered in fondant.

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Week #16 – Poppies in a Box

April 30, 2012 by

I attended a wonderful poppy making class at Sugar Flower Cake Shop last weekend and we made these adorable poppy flowers sitting in a “wooden” box. The cake was a vanilla butter cake with salted caramel buttercream on the inside and vanilla buttercream on the outside. The “wood” is made from gumpaste mixed with a softener so it won’t get too hard. You make a woodgrain effect by mixing several shades of brown together until they swirl but don’t mix completely. Then I accented the wood with some “screws” that held the box together which is just brown edible paint.

It was a lot of fun to make this cake.  Sugar Flower Cake shop does a lot of the hard work for you and all you have to do is the fun assembly of the cake – which I like. Poppies are a relatively easy flower to make since they don’t have too many petals or complicated assembly.  Plus they’re just adorable.

Next time I think I’ll air brush the color onto the poppies so I can get nice bright colors. The center is made from gumpaste dipped in nutmeg so it smells amazing!

Since I’ve gone gluten free, I didn’t get a chance to try the cake but my teammates at the International Space Apps Challenge did and I think they enjoyed it. Also I had to shoot the pictures with my iphone since I didn’t go home before my teammates devoured the cake.

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Week #2 – Faux Bois

January 18, 2012 by

Ever since I worked at The Chopping Block, I’ve become obsessed with faux wood grain.  I’ve always wanted to make a cake that looked like chopped wood.

This cake is actually a 9 inch styrofoam dummy, a 6 inch vanilla and vanilla buttercream cake and another 3 inch dummy all covered in fondant.

I used to have one of these great impression mats that had the faux bois in it.  You roll out the fondant on the impression mat and then put it on the cake.  Well, I lost it.  It’s clear plastic and very easy to lose.  So I decided to hand draw the pattern on the cake.

My first attempt I used a tool that looks like a spear so the edges were a bit rough.  But the other 2 tiers I used a mini rolling tool that looks like a tiny pizza cutter and the results were far smoother.  I also carved hearts into the “wood” for an extra bit of charm.

I finished the cake off with hand-made red flowers, gum paste buttons and a band of royal icing around each tier.  Then I found these adorable deer and decided they would be the perfect adornment to this adorable woodland cake.

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