Demolition Cake

The Demolition cake was created for my truck-obsessed niece's third birthday party.

Most people would tell you that a 3-year-old's birthday party is likely to involve quite enough carnage and demolition without any help from the cake. I am not one of those people, especially since my 3-year-old niece Alex is extremely passionate about demolition, construction, and more or less anything that involves big machines.

So I thought that a wrecking-ball cake would be ideal for her demolition-themed birthday party (if that isn't bowing to the inevitable, I don't know what is.) Of course, a wrecking ball cake that didn't actually wreck anything would be utterly pointless, so my first step was to come up with a good, working wrecking ball mechanism. I was concerned that if I made a wrecking ball that simply sat next to the cake that it was intended to wreck, the composition wouldn't be unified enough. I also didn't want to have to make an entire crane to support the wrecking ball. So I came up with a plan where a wrecking ball would rise up out of a circular cake and spin around in a complete circle, knocking down a series of gum paste buildings around the perimeter. This concept was also nicely in keeping with my series of self-destroying cakes, previous examples of which include the Melting Head Cake, the Fountain Cake, and the Self-Digging Cake for Alex's second birthday.

The wrecking ball mechanism consisted of a brass tube attached to a hobby motor, which spun inside another, larger-diameter brass tube. The hobby motor was encased inside a piece of PVC tubing, so that the cake (with a pre-cut hole in the middle) could just be slipped around it. The spinning tube had a hole drilled in the tip, to which I could tie a little piece of wire, the other end of which would ultimately be attached to the wrecking ball.

I went through a few iterations of wrecking ball tests. My first plan was to make the wrecking ball out of hard candy, embedding the wire in it when I poured the sugar. They turned out OK, but then I got worried that the sugar ball might shatter when it hit the cake and I also bought a silicon sphere mold that resulted in sugar spheres that were altogether too big and heavy for the power of the motor. My next idea was to make the wrecking ball out of marshmallow, on the theory that marshmallow would be tough enough to break the cake but spongy enough not to shatter. This turned out not to work at all, as homemade marshmallows are significantly poofier than commercial marshmallows and couldn't wreck their way out of a wet paper bag. Proving that old axiom that the third time is the charm, my third idea was modeling chocolate. This way I could roll balls of modeling chocolate to whatever size I desired, then punch holes through the center to attach the wire. This worked well, except that on my first try I only ran one wire through the middle of the modeling chocolate ball, and when I turned the wrecking ball on the wire just sliced right through the chocolate and the ball went flying. I found out, however, that if I distributed the wires at four points around the ball the centrifugal forces were dispersed enough that the ball stayed intact. I also covered the ball with a layer of royal icing and a dusting of powdered colors to make it look more iron-like.

With wrecking ball methodology ascertained, the next step was creating and decorating the cake base. The bottom of the base was a simple plywood circle, but I also needed to layer some foamcore on top of that to hide the battery, wires, and switch for the wrecking ball. To get a little color into what promised to be an otherwise fairly drab-colored cake, I painted yellow and black caution tape stripes on the plywood. I then put a smaller circle of foam core over top of this, with appropriate holes for the battery and such, and covered that with a tiled pattern of marbled fondant. Actually, I did this twice because I didn't like my haphazard arrangement of shades of grey the first time around, so I tore it up and redid it with a much more careful pattern.

Now having a base for my cake, I set about making the sides and top. For the top of the cake, I made a circle of marbled fondant with a pre-cut hole in it for the wrecking ball. By letting this dry for a week, I wound up with a nice rigid circle that would give me a much cleaner, more architectural finished cake than I would get by covering the cake with soft fondant after it was baked. This resulted in me making the interesting discovery that blue food coloring turns green when exposed to sunlight. Fortunately, it still looked OK with the rest of my cake color scheme (at least it was a cool, grayish-green) but hopefully this can help prevent potential problems in the future. For the sides of the cake I made a series of very dark blue and purple gum paste rectangles, which looked fine, but, due to the massive quantity of food coloring involved, tasted revolting. Perhaps next time I should start with chocolate fondant.

Now all I needed was something for the ball to wreck. In order to get something that would shatter nicely, I opted for skeletal buildings made of gum paste, rather than trying to smash through actual cake. I still wonder if that was a bit of a cop-out. I made a series of eight skeletal framework buildings of increasing height. I calculated that, in total, they required just over 300 feet of gum paste strips. It was a bit of a time-consuming process because I first had to roll out the gum paste, then cut it into strips and use a bit of brass tubing to create a riveted texture. Once the gum paste dried, I could cut it to the appropriate length, and then stick three pieces of each length together with royal icing to made "U-beams". (I thought about making I-beams, but decided that would be more difficult and wouldn't look as good.) After the U-beam royal icing dried, I used more royal icing to put the pieces together into each of the three sides of each of the eight buildings. I then had to wait for that to dry again before I could stick the three sides of each building together. In other words, I spent about two weeks every day after work hunched over my table sticking tiny grey bits of gum paste to other tiny grey bits of gum paste. Whee!

Once the buildings were done, I had to make the expanded steel (by which I mean royal icing) inserts to go between the gum paste girders. Fortunately, this went a lot faster than the gum paste project, even considering that I was also piping lots of royal icing chain link fence that was ultimately destined to go around the perimeter of the cake. I used a #2 and a #1 piping tip, so my hand did get a little sore, but that's to be expected.

Once the royal icing was dry, I just peeled it off the wax paper and stuck it into the holes of the gum paste buildings with a little more royal icing.

At this point it seemed that I really should make some actual cake to include in my cake. This was probably the easiest actual cake I've ever made, since I actually wanted it to be round, which just so happens to be the shape of normal cake pans. So, for once, no cake carving, no giant pile of gooey cake scraps, just some torting and filling, and making sure that I would up with a cake the correct height to fit with the premade buildings. I did have to cut a carefully angled hole in it to accommodate the wrecking ball mechanism, but compared to my usual practice of carving cakes into the shapes of rats and human heads and such, it was quite easy.

With the cake in place around the wrecking ball, it was very quick work to slap my pre-made top and sides on and place my eight building around the perimeter. I also flung some edible glitter on the sides to give it a little more sparkle.

From there it was a simple matter of placing the fence pieces, and strewing a few broken bits of girders and such about to give it more of that "in the process of demolition" feel. In retrospect, it might have made a stronger artistic statement if I had started with a complete building and wrecked that, rather than starting with an already wrecked building and simply wrecking it more.

At this point it occurred to me that, as I was making this cake for a three-year-old's birthday party, it might be a good idea to incorporate some birthday candles into the design. Considering that they were a complete afterthought, I thought they turned out rather well. I encased the three candles in various heights of leftover gum paste girders and stuck them to the chain link fence, right behind the switch that turned on the wrecking ball.

To bring the whole composition together, I added some black food coloring shadows into the seams between the buildings and the cake itself and I added some bright yellow highlights to the buildings, which picked up the yellow paint on the bottom base.

The finishing touch - little royal icing people watching from outside the fence. I like to make my sugar crowds along the same lines that I make my scale figures when I draw set sketches for the plays I design, keeping the people blank, white, and anonymous so as not to distract attention from the scenery or the cake which is the true focal point of the piece. In cake form, this tends to give my crowds a bit of a zombie-horde feel, which, as you can probably guess, I really enjoy.

The presentation of the cake at the party went quite well. Alex was excited about tuning on the switch, but she's sort of a cautious kid, so she also kept turning it off and her friend Noah would turn it back on. So the destruction proceeded a bit in fits and starts, but eventually the ball reached full speed and full destructive capability. I wish I had made the wire on the wrecking ball just a tad longer, because I think it would have made the destruction more impressive, but all in all I was extremely pleased. And Alex looked delightfully like an angelic little blond Godzilla gnawing on the broken girders.

Spider Cupcakes

The spider cupcakes were my first commissioned baking project for my niece's preschool, to be part of the bake sale at their fall carnival. My goal was to show off and entertain myself while not traumatizing the children or horrifying the parents.

It wasn't actually a Halloween carnival, but it was in October, so I figured that gave me license to make something a bit spooky, though the fact that the audience was two-to-five-year-olds placed some obvious restraints on what I could get away with. Because my time was also fairly limited I decided to go with the restrained elegance of a basic spider and web design.

I made the webs freehand with white royal icing from a medium-sized round piping tip. As I learned from the snowflakes on the Season of Love Cake, little kids love crunchy royal icing candy. At first I tried a few methods of making curved webs - piping them over bowls and such - but the results weren't particularly inspiring, so I decided just to make them flat, which was much easier.

For the spiders, I was going for something leaning towards refined and arty (as opposed to ugly and scary or goofy and cartoony). I decided on a simple two-color palette. The dominant color was a deep grey-purple, highlighted with yellow. In the interests of maintaining a clean, elegant look I went relatively minimalist with the spiders. Each one was made up simply of two balls - one for the cephalothorax and one for the abdomen - plus, of course, eight legs. I made all these pieces out of gum paste. For the heads and bodies I started with three equal sized pieces - two purple and one yellow. I placed the two purple pieces on either side of the yellow piece and rolled the whole thing into a ball, resulting in purple spiders with irregular yellow stripes down their backs. For the legs, I just put a piece of yellow alongside a piece of purple and rolled them into very thin, striped ropes, which I cut to length and bent at the knee.

Before I even made the cupcakes, I was able to assemble the spiders on the webs. I'm pleased to say that I went to the trouble of tinting the royal icing that I used to stick the spiders together the same purple as the gum paste. I often find myself to be too lazy to tint my royal icing adhesive appropriately, and I always regret it. The key to assembling convincing spiders is to remember that the legs are attached to the cephalothorax, not the abdomen.

With my spiders settled comfortably on their webs, it was time to make cupcakes. I used some special Halloween cupcake paper cups for most of them, but I ran out and had to use plain silver for the rest. My initial plan had been to frost the cupcakes with buttercream icing the color of fall leaves, and then texture it like a leaf by gently pressing it with a piece of lettuce. That way (I thought) it would look like the spiders had spun their webs in a tree covered with fall leaves. It didn't work at all. The buttercream just stuck to the lettuce and rather than nicely textured, it wound up bumpy and ugly. So I gave up on that idea and just piped the icing in a swirl with a big star tip and then plopped the spider webs on top, which looked fine. Frankly, even if my plan to make the leaf texture had worked, it wouldn't have read very well through the spider web anyway.

The cupcakes were very well received when I dropped them off at the preschool. I'm told that they were even sold for more money than the standard cupcakes at the bake sale. It's nice when I'm able to combine my love of showing off my cakes with something that actually benefits other people.

Robot Baby Cake

I made this creepy robot baby cake for my little friend Isaac's second birthday party. Nobody requested this, I came up with this one on my own.

My little friend Isaac has a room entirely decorated with space robots(plus the giant stuffed spider I made him when he was born, which sort of fits in with the decor if you assume it's a giant stuffed SPACE spider.)His wall is covered with framed robot pictures, intermingled with illustrations from children's books about space travel from the 1950's; the hooks on his door are made of wooden stacking robot toys; and the wall over his crib reads "Blast Off!" His mom even turned his diaper pail into DiaperBot! He lives to serve humanity and devour and vaporize our dirty diapers. At least until he rebels against his human masters and destroys us all. And after a few months of eating diapers, who can blame him?

So when it came time to make Isaac's second birthday cake, what could be more appropriate than a robot cake? And naturally a robot cake ought to do more than lie there like a pile of hardware. It ought to do something. But what? Unfortunately I don't know anything at all about robotics, in spite of having taking a brief Kinetic Art class, in which we made a vibrating spider out of a motor, a paper clip, and an Altoids tin. So I turned where everyone turns when they need robot construction kits - the internet. I purchased two - one for a line-following snail robot and one for a sound-activated walking robot (clap once, it starts walking; clap again, it stops walking.)

As it turns out, robot kits supplied by the internet are really lame. First of all, they teach you absolutely nothing about robotics. The circuit boards are pre-assembled, so all the "assembly" that I got to do involved zip-ties and plastic pop-rivets. Not really very educational. Also, the snail robot couldn't carry even so much as a cupcake, so it was essentially useless to me. The walking robot, however, had more potential. It clearly wasn't strong enough to make the entire cake walk (which would have been cool) but, by laying the robot on its back I was able to achieve a nice kicking and flailing motion. "Aha!" I said to myself, "I can make that look like a newborn baby robot, lying on its back and kicking its adorable little aluminum arms and legs!" Some of you might be tempted to argue that a newborn baby robot cake might be more appropriate for a party for, say, a newborn baby, as opposed to a party for a two-year-old. Well, you're right, but I didn't have time to learn how to make a toddling robot, so a newborn baby robot was really my only choice.

First I created a dowel framework that would support the body of the robot while leaving the legs free to flail. Then I rolled out a big sheet of gum paste, to be cut into the various metal plates. Once the gum paste dried enough to be rigid, but not enough to make it impossible to cut, I cut out arms, legs, hands, and feet and attached them to the robot's little legs with a bit of royal icing.

My sister (ably assisted by her two-year-old daughter) kindly baked the cake for me. I started out with two 9" square cakes, which I cut up and reassembled into a small body section, to be mounted on top of the robot base, and a head, to sit adjacent to the robotic body. I covered both of these with a layer of fondant (which actually took a couple of tries - the first time out I made both the body and the head too big, so I had to peel the fondant off, re-carve the cakes, and recover them) and mounted them in the appropriate places on the cake board.

In order to hide at least the majority of the plastic robot mechanism, I cut rectangles of gum paste and assembled them around the cake and the base of the robot. I wish that I had thought to make the body of the robot more human and anatomical because then I could have made it kind of a Matrix-style cyborg-y baby trapped in a metal cocoon, but I didn't think of that until it was too late. I also made a face plate and mouth plate to put on the head, along with a little pair of circular ears.

At this point, it was about 1:00 in the morning on the day of the party (I got a really late start on this cake - sorry, Isaac!), so I was really rushing to add all the additional details. As a result, I was unfortunately unable to put as much care and detail in as I would have liked, and I also didn't have time to let the gum paste tubing dry sufficiently so it turned out pretty wilted. The cake did end up with an interesting steam punk vibe about it though, with all the royal icing rivets. I confess that I couldn't resist adding a little gum paste belly button rivet and two subtle little gum paste testicles. Evidently no one noticed, because no one at the party commented on it, which is probably just as well, since it was a pretty juvenile thing to do.

In retrospect, maybe I should have left the cake white rather than painting it, because it looked a lot cleaner unpainted, but I suppose that might have made it seem unfinished. I was going to paint the entire thing silver, but I didn't have enough silver luster dust (I was using luster duster dissolved in gin, because I didn't have any vodka [alcohol works better than water because it dries faster due to the alcohol content.] If you're thinking I was totally unprepared for this cake project, you're right - sorry again, Isaac.) So I painted the outer plates silver and the inner "skin" areas gold. It still looked a little too monochromatic, so I added some shiny blue and red accents.

At this point I realized that my cake seemed to be leaking brown sugary goo. I had refrigerated and thawed the cakes a few times over the course of the day, because cold cakes are firmer for carving and fondant smoothing. As I said earlier, I messed up the fondant covering, so there were several trips in and out of the refrigerator. Apparently in my refrigerator this generates humidity or something and breaks down the icing enough to cause the cake to leak, slowly but continuously. Well, now I know not to do that again. Fortunately, in this case, it wasn't that bad. The leakage didn't get anywhere near the electronics, so it didn't interfere with the robot's functionality. In fact, the little trickle emerging from the corner of the head looked like an oil leak, so it basically worked with the overall concept.

The cake was a hit at the party, especially with my 2-and-a-half-year-old niece, who enjoyed clapping it on and off. Later in the party, she inadvertently turned the cake on by shrieking in rage that she was not permitted to play with the birthday boy's new toys (because the birthday boy was currently playing with them himself.) I think we all know what that frustration feels like. We left the party early.

Housewarming Cake

Slightly less than a year after we moved into our new house, my sister, her husband, and I decided that we were finally ready to have a housewarming party, which naturally provided me with a perfect excuse to overdo the cake.

I wanted to convey the idea that, of all the buildings in all the world, we had found the perfect house for us, so I designed a cake that was made up of a collection of small buildings that, when properly lit, cast the shadow of our house on the wall.

The first problem, of course, was to find a light source that cast a sufficiently defined shadow on the wall. After initial tests with household clip lights and powerful flashlights, it became clear that I really needed a bona fide theatrical lighting instrument. So I bought myself a mini-ellipsoidal pattern projector. Which means that I need to build a puppet theatre, now that I have such a nice light for it.

With my light source in hand, I now needed to figure out what the silhouette of our house actually looks like. I think it has a relatively distinctive silhouette (at least distinctive enough that our guests at the party were able to convincingly pretend that they recognized it.) To insure accuracy, I took a photo of the front of the house and traced that, deciding at the same time which features to include and which superfluous features to ignore. When I was happy with my drawing I blew it up to the full size that I wanted the shadow to ultimately be.

I now needed a full scale foam core mockup of the cake, positioned precisely the same way relative to the wall and to the light source as the finished cake would ultimately be. I set up a table in my studio, with the image of the desired silhouette taped to wall behind it and my light source clamped to a book shelf across the room. So as to be able to precisely position the completed cake buildings the same way relative to one another as the foam core mockup, I designed a base for the cake that would include a 1" grid to which I could align all my pieces. In order to insure that I would be able to recreate the setup in the dining room for the party itself, I took precise measurements of the relationship between the cake base, the lens of the lighting instrument, and the wall.

From there it was largely a process of trial and error, creating one building at a time in just right size, shape, and position to block out an incremental portion of the light to create the house's silhouette. I also had to keep myself cognizant of the fact that I needed to incorporate some buildings that were actually large enough to contain some cake. Otherwise I would just be making a big gum paste city, which would have been a big disappointment to our guests.

With the foam core mockup complete, I then had to translate that into a complete set of Bristol board templates which I could use to cut out the gum paste. In the interests of not getting massively confused, I numbered all the buildings. If I recall correctly, there were eleven distinct buildings, several of which I divided into substructures which I labeled with letters. Remarkably, my labeling system actually worked - at no point in the process did I wind up with a carefully cut out piece of gum paste and no idea what to do with it.

I also made the cake base at this point, which consisted of a piece of 3/8" foamcore covered with fondant, into which I etched lines on a 1"grid. I then painted it like a parti-colored sidewalk and sponged on some royal icing for texture.

Finally I was ready to start creating the actual gum paste buildings, rolling out the gum paste and cutting it out with an X-acto knife using my Bristol board templates. Because there were so many pieces, it was quite a time consuming process, but it all went very smoothly, expect that I didn't have nearly enough flat surfaces in my studio to set all my pieces to dry. I really need one of those flat racks. Maybe I should build one instead of whining about it.

My plan was to do most of the color by hand, but I started out with a few different colors of gum paste - grey, blue, and pink - to get a different color base to build up from. My plan was to ultimately end up with a wide variety of architectural styles, thereby driving home the concept that, while we had essentially infinite choices of house, we culled the choices down to the perfect one.

As I was cutting the gum paste pieces, I also beveled the corners, in the hopes that they would then fit together in nice corners, rather than having more visible seams. For the most part this worked well enough that I was at least able to hide any imperfections with a little strategically placed royal icing.

With the basic gum paste shapes cut out, I set about embellishing them (variously with bricks, stones, adobe textures, wood panels, metallic windows, neo-classical columns, and even a nice little caryatid that I was rather proud of) and painting them.

Assembly was a rather finicky project, because I had to make sure that the shadows lined up appropriately with my shadow sketch, while slotting little slivers of cake into every available divot, some only a 1/2 inch thick. The only real problem I had was with the roof of one of the buildings wanting to cave in under the weight of the smaller buildings on top of it, so I had to disassemble it, shove in some foam core supports, and reassemble.

Once I had all the pieces together, I added some additional bricks and such to cover up messy seams, and then did some airbrushing, in attempt to unify the scene.

Because I was making it, it naturally ended up looking like a bit of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, an effect that was astronomically amplified once I had placed all of my little, white, unintentionally zombie-like, royal icing figures around the scene.

As a backdrop to project the shadow onto, I covered a sheet of foamcore with a vaguely cloudy-ish grayish-blue piece of fabric. Remarkably, I was able to move my entire cake/lighting/backdrop setup from my studio to the dining room without any detrimental effect on the projected silhouette. Truly, I wouldn't have been at all surprised to have moved it and then been utterly unable to recreate the shadow effect that I had achieved in my studio.

In many ways, this was not my most dynamic cake, as it didn't really do anything, or at least there was no dramatic moment in the party at which it did something that it hadn't already been doing before - casting a shadow on the wall behind it. But I like to think that it had a certain finesse to it, a certain quiet dignity that was appropriate to the occasion. Plus I enjoyed how, as we cut it up to eat it, it became evermore and more a diorama of catastrophic destruction, with the shadow crumbling right alongside its more solid counterpart. Also, the royal icing zombies made great garnishes for the slices of cake and everyone had a good time making the shadow of a little stuffed praying mantis menace the shadow of the house.

Digger Cake

The digger cake was for my niece's second birthday. I figured that two was old enough that I should make the cake relate to her interests, but young enough that I still had majority creative control.

My niece loves trucks. Excavators were an early favorite. So when it came time to make her second birthday cake, I thought she'd enjoy a cake with a digger built right in. To amuse myself, I decided to make the cake shaped like a giant face, rising up out of the dirt with the digger coming out of its mouth. I liked the idea of gouging out the cake's cheek with a big metal scoop.

The first order of business was to make the scoop. I purchased some plans from somewhere on the internet and adapted them a bit to suit my own needs. I needed the digger to be able to reach all parts of the cake, so it had to spin 360 degrees and it had to move from the perimeter of the cake to the center.

Basically, the mechanism I came up with consisted of a 1" ID steel tube 4" long, mounted to a heavy wooden base. Nested inside that tube was a length of 1" OD aluminum tube about 1' in height. This inner tube had a notch cut into the top so that the digger arm could slide up and down within it. Then a bolt ran through the top of the tube and through the aluminum bar that formed the main arm of the digger. This arm had a track cut in it so that it could slide in and out, closer to and further from the digger's pivot point. Connected to this digger arm was another handle, connected in turn to the scoop itself, so that it could be used to rotate the scoop up and down.

As soon as my niece saw the scoop she was determined to master its use, which actually required a fair amount of manual dexterity. Since manual dexterity is not a strong suit of most not-quite-two-year-olds, she had some initial trouble and got very frustrated the first day, but she was determined and within a few days she was using it like a pro. Then I had to reclaim it so that I could actually use it for the cake.

I used chocolate cake, of course, since that way it would look like dirt when we scooped it up. I started with some oval cakes and carved them into a big, sort of cartoonish, oversized face shape. Since it was for a child's birthday party and it was going to be gouged out with a metal scoop I didn't want it to be 100% realistic. That seemed like it would be too macabre for the occasion.

Because I wanted it to be easy to dig, I wanted to ice the cake with standard buttercream, rather than fondant, which I thought would be difficult to tear through with the scoop. So I used a nice thick coating of buttercream icing and smoothed it with a damp paintbrush. For the eyes, I made some little gum paste half spheres and cut out the irises so I'd have somewhere to stick the candles. With those in place, I piped more buttercream on to get the details of the eyelids, lips, and nose.

Then, to make it look like the face was rising up out of the dirt I made a batch of pressed sugar, which is just regular white sugar with a bit of water mixed in thoroughly. It can then be pressed into a mold, or, as in this case, shaped by hand. I used it to build up a hill of sugar around the face. For good measure, I put a few blobs of dirt onto the face itself, as if the face had just risen from the earth and hadn't yet shaken off the detritus.

My next step was to airbrush the face. I started by putting in some blue veins as an undercoat, then built up shades of flesh tone, red, and brown, then some dark purple for shadows. I wasn't altogether happy with how the dirt looked, so I sprinkled on some brown sugar to give it more variety and depth.

I hadn't masked off the gum paste eyeballs, so I had to carefully wash off the airbrush color with a damp paintbrush. For eyebrows and eyelashes I piped on some royal icing detail, then painted in irises, painted the eyebrows and lashes, and painted on some white highlights on the eyes and lips.

With two candles stuck through the eye holes and the aluminum digger planted in the mouth, I was done.

My niece loved it, and even helped use the digger to serve our guests. And once the cake was gone, she still had a digger to use in her sandbox.

Poo-Flinging Monkey Cake

I made this creepy poo-flinging monkey cake for our little friend Isaac's first birthday party. This was a special request by Isaac's mother, who was also the recipient of the dancing yeti wedding cake.

What does every little boy want for his first birthday? That's right - a cake shaped like a creepy-looking monkey! And what's even better than a creepy-looking monkey cake? That's right - a creepy-looking monkey cake that flings poo, just like a real monkey.

OK, maybe that's not exactly what my little friend Isaac would have requested for his first birthday cake, but he can't talk, and that is exactly what his mom requested.

The first step, of course, was to figure out exactly how the poo mechanism should work. My first thought was to make it a sort of catapult, but thenI realized that it would be more fun if it could fling poo repeatedly without a complicated reset of the mechanism. So I decided to go with a spring-loaded hinge. I made an armature for the arm and hand out of wood and brass tubing - I felt that it was necessary to have a metal structure within each individual finger so they wouldn't break off when I pulled the arm back to release the poo. The arm was connected via the spring hinge to a post, which was in turn secured to the heavy wooden base of the cake.

Before I made the cake, I sculpted the arm out of gum paste and fondant around the wooden armature, which meant that I had a sort of ghostly white monkey arm on a stick. I did load it up with some raisinettes (aka cake monkey poo), which it flung quite effectively, so I was ready to move onto the cake.

My sister was kind enough to actually bake the cakes for me. Fortunately she baked more than I asked her to, because the amount that I asked her to make would not have been enough. I had to cut notches in each tier and slide them into place around the arm support post. When I was done, I had what appeared to be a squat, one-armed robot, at least until I carved it into a more monkey-like shape.

This cake marked my first experiment with using rice krispie treats to sculpt additively onto my cakes. It's a technique that I learned, like so many others, from reading Colette Peters' books. My plan was to sculpt the tail, haunches, and second arm out of rice krispie treats. Not having ever made rice krispie treats myself, for some reason I thought they solidified really quickly. "I'll have to work fast," I thought, "but once I get them into shape they'll hold really well." Yeah, it didn't work out that way atall.

I'm not sure whether it was because it was really wet out or just because that's the way rice krispie treats are, but they didn't behave at all the way I expected them to. As I started sculpting them, they were just gooey and collapsing everywhere. I hollered for my sister to bring me skewers! Hurry! Hurry! Yikes! I stuck in skewers, here, there, everywhere! Anything to hold those rice krispie treats together and to hold them in place. Pretty soon I had a proto-monkey which appeared to be undergoing a truly ghastly acupuncture session. But at least it had arms and legs. I added some detail to the hand and feet with fondant.

I made the facial features by piping buttercream and sculpting it with a paintbrush. It was kind of hard to make it look like a monkey rather than like a sort of withered old man, but I think I did OK. I was using one of my baby niece’s animal picture books as a reference. It was very nice of her to share it with me.

The ears I had made a few days in advance out of gum paste with skewers embedded in them so I could just stab them into place in the cake.

What's the point of a poo-flinging monkey without gross, matted fur? It would have been easy to make the fur out of frosting, but that tends to be too cartoonish for my taste. So I came up with a different plan - those little crunchy chow mein noodles. I know, I know it sounds a little weird. But potato chips and chocolate can be good. Those little shoestring potato snacks and chocolate can be good. I though it was workable. And they looked GREAT! It took me quite a while to cover the entire monkey and I seriously underestimated the amount of noodles it would take. Fortunately, there was some confusion as to who was buying how many packages of noodles, and we wound up buying approximately twice as many as I thought I would need. Which turned out to be just barely enough.

The noodles were already a pretty good base monkey color, so I just airbrushed in some mottling and some shadows. I painted the eyes with black food coloring and then went over that with clear piping gel to get the necessary depth and sheen. With that, the monkey itself was done. Left to my own devices I probably would have left it at that, but fortunately my sister gave me the kick in the ass that I needed to make it a better presentation. She came up with the idea of surrounding the monkey with bananas. So we bought about sixteen bananas and I made some gum paste leaves to fill in the gaps. It looked quite regal really, like he was a monkey king sitting on his banana throne.

The party was in an outdoor park, which was a great setting. We arranged the monkey on a picnic table underneath a big tree, with a convenient bowl of raisinettes to use as poo. The green leaves of the tree complimented the green leaves on the cake perfectly and I got to bask in the compliments of the guests at the party in the next picnic area as well as those of the guests at our party. I actually went to the party thinking that the cake was entirely innocuous and mainstream, at least compared to all my other cakes. But the unanimous verdict was that it was actually quite creepy, primarily due to the huge, hypnotic, glassy eyes.

The weight of all the gum paste and frosting and chow mein noodles on the arm made the poo flinging a little more sluggish than it was in my initial tests, so the monkey only threw his poo about two feet in front of him. Oh well, next time maybe I can get a better angle of release.

Cutting the cake was very funny because I had to cut it away around the arm mechanism. We ended up with a monkey arm hovering above a field of cake and banana carnage. The verdict on the chow mein noodles with the cake was mixed. Some people thought it worked quite well - a bit of crunch, a bit of salt - while others just found it weird and incongruous and ate around it. The birthday boy himself didn't weigh in on that particular issue, as he doesn't have enough teeth to get any of the chow mein noodles, but he certainly seemed to enjoy the cake. No one's quite sure how he got some on the back of his head, though.

Triple Animal Cake

This cake was made for my niece's first birthday. I was trying to make a 3-dimensional version of those children's picture books where each page is split into three parts so that you can mix and match the heads, bodies, and feet of the animals.

My plan to adapt the concept of the mix-and-match animal parts book into a 3-dimensional cake was to build the cake around a central pole, so that each tier would be able to rotate independently of the others. The first tier was the feet, the second tier the body, and the third tier the head. Because I was planning to put all kinds of decorative schmutz onto and into these cakes and because I wanted to have just a basic chocolate cake section for the one-year-old birthday girl to smush, I also made a hat for the fourth tier, which frankly didn't really add a whole lot, visually or conceptually speaking.

Each tier was divided into three sections, each decorated like a different animal. That way, you could line all the sides up so that the three animals appeared in their entirety on the three sides of the cake, or you could rotate the sections relative to one another so that, for, instance, each side of the cake would show the feet of one animal, the body of another, and the head of the third. I also wanted to experiment with different decorating and texturing techniques, so rather than decorating in the usual way with only fondant and frosting and food coloring, I decided to enhance the primary texture of each animal with a different food product and then also coordinate the flavor of the cake within to the decor on the facade of the cake. My animal / decoration / flavor combinations were:

Side #1: Monkey / Nuts / Hazelnut Chocolate Cake

The monkey side of the cake was made of chocolate cake with hazelnut paste added to the batter, with nuts of various types and textures applied to the outside to create the appearance of matted monkey fur.

Side #2: Bird / Candied Citrus Peel / Chocolate Orange Zest Cake

The bird was chocolate cake with orange zest added to the batter, with candied lemon, orange, and grapefruit peel feathers.

Side #3: Alligator / Sugared Mint Leaves / Mint Chocolate Chip Cake

The alligator was chocolate cake with mint chocolate chips mixed in, with sugar-coated mint leaves for the textured skin.

The first thing I needed was a central pole for my cakes to rotate around. I started with a heavy circular wooden base with a 3/4" threaded rod screwed into a phalange in the center. To support the cakes, I got four plexiglass circles with holes drilled in the middle with acrylic tubes the height of the tiers glued around the holes. So that we would be able to turn the tiers without touching the cakes, I glued little plexiglass circles onto the edges of the bigger circles to use as handles. To support these plexi cake bases, I used big nuts and fender washers, screwed onto the central threaded rod. Each tier required three nuts and a fender washer. The nuts were just the right size to fit inside the acrylic tube while the fender washers were big enough for the plexi bases to rest on. To assemble, I started with one nut, then a fender washer, then another nut pinching the fender washer in between. Then one more nut, positioned so that the distance from the top of the fender washer to the top of the nut was the same as the height of the tier. That way, when I slipped the plexi plate and acrylic tube over the nuts, the plate rested on the fender washer and the nuts at the top and bottom kept the whole piece stable. Then repeat the whole operation for each successive tier. I did a dry run putting this whole assembly together without cake to make sure it would work the way it did in my head before I started working on any of the edible cake components. When I reassembled it later with the cakes in place, I also sprayed the washers with cooking spray as lubricant to counteract the weight of the cakes, which I was afraid would hinder the rotation.

Before I started on the cakes themselves, there was lot of advance work to do:

Sugared mint leaves:

These were easy to make, if a bit gooey and tedious. Fortunately, my sister had a big mint plant in her back yard, so I had ready access to a virtually infinite supply of mint leaves. To sugar them, I dipped each leaf one at a time in egg white, then in granulated sugar and put them on wax paper to dry. I have since realized that I could probably have gotten a nicer result had I rubbed on the egg white with my fingers in a thinner layer and then sifted the sugar overtop. As it was, some of my leaves got too much egg white or too much sugar on them and wound up being unusable or just a little lumpy and weird.

Candied citrus peels:

I started with lemon peels, orange peels, and grapefruit peels, so that I would have a variety of sizes and colors to use for my feathers, using a recipe from Jacques Torres. First I cut the fruit into fourths and removed the peels. My mom was in town (she and Dad were both a big help on this cake) so she took the leftover fruit and carefully separated the fruit from the inner membranes to feed to my niece. I tried to eat some of the grapefruit but Mom shooed me away. Apparently I don't rate as highly as she does. The pieces of peel went into a pot of boiling water three times to blanch some of the bitterness out of them. Then they went into a pot of sugary water to simmer for a couple of hours. Then I pulled them out of the syrup and left them on a wire rack to drain and dry. I had been lead to believe, by Jacques Torres' recipe, that they would dry out in a few hours. As usual, Jacques' recipe didn't work out the way I expected. None of Jacques' recipes that I have ever tried have worked out the way I expected. I left the peels out on the rack overnight, and they were still nowhere near dry. At that point, I became pressed for time, so I had to put them into a warm oven to dry before I could put them on the cake.

Gum paste faces:

To make the snouts of the alligator and the monkey and the beak of the bird protrude appropriately from the cake surface, I made them in advance out of gum paste. As it turned out, I didn't make them quite enough in advance, as the beak wasn't quite fully hard when I went to attach it, but I'll get to that in a little bit. In order to get the shapes I needed, I draped rolled-out sheets of gum paste over forms. In the case of the monkey nose and the alligator snout I was able to find cups lying around the kitchen that were basically the right size and shape. To get the more distinctive shape of the bird's beak, I made my own form out of cardboard. All the forms had to be liberally coated with corn starch before applying the gum paste to insure that the finished pieces would release easily.

When it came time to make the cakes and the frostings, Mom and Dad were invaluable, with Mom doing most of the baking work and Dad doing most of the cleanup. For each tier, we made three two-inch tall cakes - one of each of the three flavors described above. I torted each of the cakes and filled them with chocolate buttercream frosting. Then I cut each of the cakes into thirds and stacked the thirds on top of each other, so that I wound up with three pie wedges per tier, one in each flavor, each about six inches tall. I had to cut a little divot out of the corner of each pie wedge so I could fit them around the central tubes, assembling the pie wedges back into circles. As it turns out, cakes are much flimsier when they're built this way and until I finished carving them and covering them with fondant I was very worried that the three sections of the cakes would flop outwards like the petals of a flower. As I said before, I had conceived of the hat as the smash cake for the birthday girl, so for that one I simply made a basic chocolate cake and didn't have to worry about cutting it into thirds.

Carving was pretty easy, actually, since I was going for sort of puffy cartoony animal shapes. Once I had them covered with fondant, I was able to stick my gum paste beaks and snouts on with royal icing, holding them in place with skewers until the icing dried. Unfortunately the beak wasn't quite dry enough and it sort of sunk over the skewer, so I had to leave the skewer embedded in it and pipe royal icing on top to hide the end of the skewer sticking out.

I added a base layer of royal icing details - feathers and fur and scales - because I didn't trust my textural appliques to provide the level of detail that I was looking for. I also added facial features to the heads, and nipples and belly buttons to the torsos. I wasn't quite sure what to do with the hat, so I just gave it a poorly executed inverted shell border.

Because I was visiting my sister when I made this cake, I didn't have my airbrush with me, so I had to paint the colors on the old fashioned way - with a soft brush and some paste food coloring. I didn't do a very good job - so I wound up with a lot of drips and messy brush marks. I also think I either went too muted with the alligator colors or too bright with the bird colors because they sort of didn't belong in the same world.

I was pleased with the effect of my appliques, though. I did get a little carried away with the alligator. I'm not sure why I put a little flower of mint petals around its belly button (which reptile don't even have, by the way!) My bird wound up looking a bit like it was on drugs, because I gave it big blank staring eyes surrounded by dramatic lemon peel lashes. The monkey was apparently a bit diseased, since its shoulders were bald and red and splotchy. You didn't really expect me to successfully make cute little children's book animals, did you?

The board had to be pretty big relative to the cake in order to make sure that it was stable, but I hadn't given any thought whatsoever to decorating it, so it looked very bare. Mom suggested that we get some rosemary sprigs from the garden to gussy it up a little. I think it helped.

Whatever aesthetic faults the cake may have had, my rotation mechanism worked flawlessly. With that aspect, I really couldn't have been happier. Each tier spun easily and smoothly and yet the cake as a whole still felt rock solid.

Melting Head Cake

I made this delightful severed head presentation for a party celebrating our 400th review on theyrecoming.com.

I admit that we celebrated Bride of Zombiefest before we had actually posted our 400th review on theyrecoming.com (which the party was ostensibly in honor of), but we were close and we needed to schedule it while I was still visiting my sister for the summer.

Bride of Zombiefest was also the perfect opportunity for me to make a cake that has been percolating in my head for a while now. The idea was a severed head cake, served up on a silver platter with an attractive array of garnishes, with flesh that would melt off over the course of the party, revealing the grinning skull underneath.

It was obvious that the skull should be made of royal icing, but the question of what to make the flesh out of proved to be a thornier problem. My initial plan was to use buttercream icing and put the cake on a hotplate. I'm glad that I decided to test this plan prior to implementation because the experimental buttercream nose, piped onto the experimental royal icing skull fragments, did not melt at all. Not even a little bit. My sister and I thought that the nose got a little shinier with the heat, but even that may have been wishful thinking.

This preliminary test did teach me a few important things, in addition to the big lesson that buttercream icing does not melt, at least not when I want it to. For instance, I learned that it is, in fact, safe to put buttercream icing onto royal icing, provided that the royal icing is dry first and it's the quick and easy buttercream, not the fancy cooked buttercream. I tried to put royal icing onto cake filled with the fancy buttercream for my sister's baby shower and the royal icing just dissolved into oily goo. I also learned that both red piping gel and seedless raspberry jam are fully compatible with royal icing. This was important because I needed something red to put on top of the skull and underneath the flesh so that the melting would also be bloody. I settled on the raspberry jam because it tastes better, but I actually think in retrospect that the red piping gel might have worked a little better.

At this point, though, I was far more concerned about the flesh's failure to melt. Clearly buttercream icing was not the answer, so I tried boiled icing. Boiled icing really doesn't taste very good at all, but I had high hopes for its melting properties as I confidently made another test nose and set it on the hot plate. And . . . nothing. No melting. Nothing even close to melting. Not so much as a little bit of softening or a sheen of moisture.

At this point I nearly gave up on the melting aspect of the cake. Bear in mind that while I was carrying out these tests the day of the party was fast approaching and I was already well into the creation of the advance elements of the cake - the bloody eyeballs, the skull, and the garnishes, which I will discuss in more detail later in this narrative. But I decided to persevere and test one final type of icing - whipped cream icing. I have never used whipped cream icing before because it is notoriously unstable and the cake, once frosted, has to be frozen or refrigerated. Surely this intimidating, unreliable icing would be fragile enough to melt off my cake!

I made a few test noses this time, so I could test the icing in the fridge and the freezer as well as on the hot plate. I also made test noses of a 50-50 mix of boiled icing and whipped cream icing, because I was afraid that the whipped cream icing, by itself, would be too unstable.(I also tried mixing the whipped cream icing with the buttercream icing, but this instantaneous collapsed into a lumpy mess.) It turned out, however, that the whipped cream icing is actually sturdier and more structural by itself than in conjunction with the boiled icing. And, to my lasting delight, it turns out that whipped cream icing does, in fact, melt when placed on a hotplate!

With rekindled hope for the melting face, I performed a few additional tests on the whipped cream icing to determine if it can be painted with an airbrush (It can.) and to determine if it can be painted with a paintbrush (It can, but only if it's thoroughly frozen.). At this point I also hit on the idea of using a heat lamp to melt the cake from above in conjunction with the hotplate melting it from below. Of course, I didn't have a heat lamp, but I tried a 60 watt bulb and even that melted the test nose, so I went out and bought a heat lamp from the hardware store across the street, as well as a 200 watt bulb. I would have bought two heat lamps, but they only had one, which, as you'll see later, was very fortuitous.

And thus ends the saga of my icing experiments, leaving me ready to move on the saga of the actual cake. So if you thought the icing story was long-winded and melodramatic, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The first step of the cake construction was to make the royal icing skull. For maximum accuracy, I purchased a plastic skull to use as a mold. I used tin foil to cover the skull because it holds the shape really well, but it does have some disadvantages. Because tin foil is opaque it was hard to see the breaks between the skull segments and tin foil also seems to lengthen the dry time of the royal icing. This wouldn't be a problem except that I'm impatient and wasn't willing to wait more than a day to try to unmold the pieces, at which point they were not completely dry. Thus, it took me three tries to make a solid jawbone. I actually managed to wait three days before unmolding the last one, so it was completely dry and came off perfectly.

Unmolding aside, actually making the icing skull was really quite easy. I piped the icing on with a wide, flat tip, then smoothed it with a slightly damp paintbrush.

While I was making things out of royal icing, I also made fifty-odd little tiaras. Why, you ask? Well, we were afraid that a cake the size of a human head wouldn't serve the twenty-five to thirty guests we were expecting at our party, so we decided to make supplemental cupcakes. If the party was Bride of Zombiefest, and the cake was the Bride, then clearly the cupcakes should be the Bridesmaids of the Monster - little fuzzy monster cupcakes (with cotton candy fur; more on that later.) So they needed tiaras, which I piped flat, then draped over a roll of wrapping paper so they would dry with a nice curve. I also made little royal icing eyes for the cupcakes, with painted irises and tiny red veins.

The next pre-baking project was the eyeballs. I have made cordial cherry eyeballs several times before and they're also summarized in the description of the cake from our first Zombiefest. Basically, maraschino cherries are soaked in brandy for a few days then drained and dipped, first in a melted coating fondant, then in white chocolate. The nice thing about the eyeballs is that they actually look better when I don't dip the cherries neatly because weird drips and blobs look like veins and pools of blood. Once the chocolate is set, the eyeballs are painted with powdered food coloring dissolved in melted cocoa butter. Some of the eyeballs were served on their own; others were used as garnishes on the head's serving tray; still others served as the eyes of the head itself.

Next came the other garnishes for the head platter - lettuce, tomatoes, and parsley. My sister came up with the idea of how to make the lettuce. I bought actual lettuce (Romaine), dusted the back with corn starch, then pressed a very thin sheet of gum paste onto it so that the gum paste picked up all the lettuce veins. I then ripped the edge a little to get it rough, rolled the edge with a ball tool to ruffle and thin it, and draped the gum paste lettuce over a bed of wax paper so it would dry with nice shape. The parsley was even easier. I just used a very small gum paste flower cutter, then cupped it with a ball tool.

For the tomatoes, I used a 50-50 gum paste-fondant mix, mostly because I didn't have enough gum paste so I had to use the fondant to stretch it. I colored this mixture bright yellow and rolled it into cherry tomato-sized balls. I used an umbrella tool to make the little divot in the top and then rolled the tomato in my hand once more to get it nice and round.

I colored all of these garnishes with ground up chalk pastels and then steamed them in front of a kettle of boiling water to set the color and give it a little sheen.

Finally, we're at the baking stage! I made a chocolate cake for the bottom of the head, then a lemon butter cake, swirled with black food coloring to give it a nice brain color, for the top of the head. I also made about fifty lemon butter cupcakes.

Once cool, I torted and filled the cakes with buttercream icing and, using my plastic skull as a model, carved the cake into the proper shape. My royal icing skull fit together remarkably well over top of the cake. At this point, it would actually have been a pretty cool looking cake in and of itself, but I was nowhere near done.

A coating of raspberry jam made the skull look delightfully freshly skinned, especially once I had popped the cordial cherry eyeballs into place.

At this point I transferred the cake onto its silver serving tray (borrowed from a church where a friend of mine works) and I could no longer avoid the part of the operation of which I was most terrified - the icing. I put the head in the freezer for a little while first so it would be nice and cold when the icing hit it.

Actually icing the cake went more smoothly than I had feared. It took me three batches of whipped cream icing and between each batch I put the cake in the freezer. Piping the whipped cream icing for details like the nose, lips, ears, and eyelids was a little challenging because if I held the piping bag for too long the icing got too soft, but all in all I was happy with the face creation process. I was trying for a woman's face because she was supposed to be a bride, but it turned out looking androgynous, possibly skewed a little towards the masculine. I hoped that a little airbrushed makeup would tip it into womanhood. Into the freezer it went!

Airbrushing the cake was a little nerve-wracking because the room where I was working was really hot so I had to work fast. I also had to mask off the eyeballs and teeth with parchment paper which was very difficult to do without messing up the icing, but it all went pretty well in the end. The blue eyeshadow (I grew up in the 80's so it somehow got into my head that eyeshadow is always blue. Since I don't wear makeup myself, I've never really been disabused of this notion.), blush, and lipstick did make her look a little more feminine, but she still had a bit of an old man in drag vibe about her.

The garnishes went into place quickly and easily with a few dabs of royal icing and that was all I could do until right before the party. At this point, she was still bald, but my plan was to use cotton candy for the hair and cotton candy doesn't have a great deal of longevity. So the cake went into the freezer and I went to bed.

The party was scheduled for 12:30 in the afternoon, evening parties being inadvisable now that my sister has a five-month-old daughter. At about 9:00a.m. we started making cotton candy. First we made some colored cotton candy for the cupcake fur, using sugar mixed with powdered food coloring. A little ball of cotton candy went on top of each cupcake, followed by a tiara and a pair of eyes.

Our cotton candy machine is actually a children's toy that we purchased at a garage sale for three dollars, so it is perhaps not surprising that it overheated after about half of the cupcakes. I had a few moments of panic when I thought that it would not be in service to make hair for the cake itself, but my sister suggested putting it in the freezer to cool it off quickly, which worked like a charm.

Afraid that the machine would crap out altogether next time, I made the hair for the cake next - a tower of white hair with black Bride-of-Frankenstein-style streaks on the side. I assembled the hair on the tin-foil-covered plastic skull first, then plopped it readymade onto the cake. It looked like a wig and only exacerbated the resemblance to a drag queen - a very old one, given the gaunt cheeks, the white hair, and, due to the icing texture, the pockmarked skin. But I considered that a minor problem. My sister said she looked like Mrs. Haversham. Dad thought she looked like a French aristocrat, which also might have been pretty appropriate, given that whole guillotine escapade.

I added a little red piping gel blood to the mouth so she would look more dead and a little red piping gel blood writing on the lettuce stating, of course, that, "They're coming to get you, Barbara". Then I took a whole lot of photos and popped her back in the freezer to await the party.

By this time the cotton candy machine had overheated again so I had to put it back in the freezer for a while before we could finish the cupcakes. But finish them we did, just before the party. By this time, the cotton candy on the first cupcakes was already wilting and we were afraid that the cotton candy hair on the cake herself would fare even worse, due to condensation from the freezer, so we decided that the cake would remain in the freezer until most of our guests had arrived, at which point we would dramatically reveal her, then turn on the heat lamps and hope for the best.

And . . . amazing enough . . . the best actually happened! Even better than I had hoped! I brought her out and set her on the hotplate, turned on the heat lamp on one side and the 200 watt bulb on the other and . . . her flesh started to melt! And, because I only had one heat lamp, at first only the left side of her face melted. Which was incredibly cool looking! She ended up with one side of her face still solid and the other melted all the way to the skull. The heat lamp even toasted the melted icing a bit at the closest point, so it looked like the skull had been cooked.

First, the hair melted, then the flesh on top of the skull. The eye socket started to appear, followed by the cheekbone, and the lower jaw. The nose was sloughed off, revealing the nasal cavity and the teeth appeared with a horrifying smile. The eyeball melted away, first crying tears of melted colored cocoa butter, then bursting open to reveal the shiny red cherry within. Red piping gel blood ran out of the mouth, mingling with the gooey white melted flesh.

Once the first side was thoroughly melted away, I switched the heat lamp to the other side until I was left with nothing but a gooey skull sitting in a pool of its own liquefied flesh. Even the garnish cordial cherry eyeballs melted away, leaving only bright cherries amidst the little red tomatoes.

In my darker moments I doubted the melting head cake. I'm ashamed to say that I even seriously considered throwing in the towel and just making a non-melting severed head cake. But that would have been unworthy. That would have been cowardly. I'm proud of myself that I didn't surrender to the temptation of taking the easy way out. I persevered and, in spite of the combined efforts of many different kinds of icing and a finicky cotton candy machine, I succeeded! It was a beautiful moment.

Little Monster Cake

We often refer to my niece as "Little Monster" so naturally when I set about designing a cake for her four-month birthday party (OK, I admit it, I designed the cake first and then made up an occasion to make it for.) what I came up with was essentially a 3-dimensional bust of my niece as a slimy octopus monster. When I described this concept to my sister, she pointed out that she had been envisioning her as a cute, fuzzy, Sesame Street-type monster, not as an oozing, ugly, Cthulhu-type monster. I pointed out that, unlike Cthulhu, my design had no wings and so was merely an octopus or squid monster, not a Cthulhu monster.

Initially I was hoping to cover the entire cake with a very thin layer of Jell-o Jiggler for a truly slimy, gooey texture. Unfortunately, while preliminary tests were encouraging in terms of the feasibility of creating a very thin, firm Jiggler and draping it effectively over the cake, these same tests also revealed that Jell-o is fundamentally incompatible with all forms of icing. A couple years back I tried to incorporate a Jell-o swamp into my New Orleans Gingerbread house. This proved to be impossible because the liquid Jell-o would have dissolved the house's royal icing wrought iron railings so I used piping gel instead. I was hoping that this time the Jell-o would work because my plan was to use Jell-o which had already set up. But my hope proved to be in vain. Even solidified Jiggler dissolved sample royal icing bits away into nothing within a few hours. I think it's time that I face the fact that the marriage of Jell-o and my cake / gingerbread projects is not meant to be.

I planned the flavor combinations while still envisioning the Jell-o coating. Coordinating an entire set of cake and icing flavors to go with cherry Jell-o is quite a challenge and I suspect that, had the Jell-o actually happened, it would ultimately have been rather gross with any flavors of cake and icing. I settled on a white butter cake with raspberry buttercream icing filling. In and of itself, this might have been OK with cherry Jell-o, but I also planned hazelnut flavored tentacles, a chocolate ganache crumb coat, followed by a layer of marzipan and a royal icing finish. Like I said, it probably would have been gross with cherry Jell-o.

The first step was to make the base for the cake to sit on. My plan was to make a cute fondant baby blanket to contrast with the yucky monster. First I covered an elliptical piece of 3/8" foam core with marbled green fondant, suggesting grass. Then I rolled out another sheet of white fondant for the blanket and stamped little sea creatures on it with food coloring. I tried to drape the blanket onto the base in such a way that it would look like the monster's tentacles were squinching it up, but it didn't work that well and I probably would have been better off with a flat blanket. I also put a little blue border around the edge to make it look more like a blanket. In the end, the blanket wasn't that good and didn't really make sense with the rest of the cake, which I think proves that I'm not meant to make those sickeningly adorable baby shower cakes shaped like diaper bags. But I think we all knew that already, didn't we?

Next, the cake itself. As I already mentioned, I used a butter cake recipe. I had never before tried this recipe, mostly because I'm a much bigger fan of chocolate cake than white cake, but it turned out to be a great recipe - really buttery and one of the best cakes for carving that I've ever tried. So once it was torted and filled with the raspberry buttercream icing (made by mixing some seedless raspberry jam into vanilla buttercream icing) carving it into the shape of a baby / octopus head went very smoothly.

For the tentacles I made some praline feullitine candy that learned how to make at a candy class that Mom and I took recently. Essentially, it's hazelnut butter (made by grinding up toasted hazelnuts and confectioners sugar in a food processor) mixed with milk chocolate and feullitine, which is a lot like ground up flakes of cake ice cream cones. In this case, in fact, it was exactly like ground up flakes of cake ice cream cone because it's not like one can buy real feullitine at the local grocery store. In fact, it's hard to find even on the internet, but that may be because I'm not really sure how to spell it. The praline feullitine worked remarkably well as a sculpting material, and I soon had some lovely tentacles.

Next, I coated the cake with a smooth layer of chocolate ganache and started rolling out the marzipan. It's a good thing that I was planning to coat the entire cake with royal icing, because the marzipan did not go on neatly at all. I rolled it too thin because I didn't have enough and then it dried out, both because I put too much confectioners sugar down to roll it in and because I covered the cake too slowly. So the marzipan covering ended up extremely messy with seams all over the place and smudges of chocolate ganache everywhere.

Fortunately, none of that mattered, because the next step was to cover the entire cake with royal icing. The first layer of royal icing obscured all the imperfections. The second layer filled in all the facial details. I even put in the little dent in the top of her little baby skull. At this point I decided that it looked too much like an octopus and not enough like a monster, so I added some little ridges running up the sides of the tentacles and extending onto the face. As my sister pointed out later, it made her look sort of Cardasian.

No octopus monster is complete without suckers on its tentacles. I made these out of gum paste, cutting them out with a circle cutter, then cupping them with a ball tool. I stuck them to the tentacles with royal icing.

At this point I transferred the octopus monster onto the previously prepared base and discovered that the 3/16" foam core under the octopus monster wasn't sturdy enough to support the tentacles without bending and the royal icing coating cracked in several places and had to be repaired.

Next step - color! An airbrush probably would have been a very effective tool, but mine was 2,000 miles away, so I did it the old fashioned way - paste food colors and a soft paint brush. In the interests of maximum ickyness, I went with a base coat of flesh tone interspersed with icy blues. I painted the Cardasian ridges purple and added deeper blue shadows. Red suckers and white highlights finished off the paint job.

Now the cake looked pretty good, but it just wasn't wet enough. An octopus monster presumably lives in water and my niece drools a lot so I had a couple of reasons for wanting the cake to look moist. I put a big pile of piping gel drool in front of the monster's mouth (which was chewing on a tentacle in homage to my niece's habit of constantly chewing on her hand - and her toys, and her clothes, and our fingers, and basically anything else that comes within arm's reach of her). Then I sprayed the entire cake with some watery corn syrup for that all over, just-emerged-from-the-briny-deeps shine. This had the added advantage of making the colors run and blend a little bit which gave the cake more of a natural look.

Most everybody at the party thought the cake was sort of gross (looking, not tasting) and didn't really look anything like my niece, who is the world's cutest baby. My sister, on the other hand, thought that it did look like her and she therefore declared the monster cake absolutely adorable.

Seasons of Love Cake

This is by far the most complicated cake we've made. My sister and I spent the entire day before the wedding working on it (about 18 hours, each) but during the week before, I spent about 50 hours and my sister (due to her day job) spent about 30 hours working on it. That all adds up to about 120 woman-hours and an incredibly fun project.

We didn't keep close track of the cost, but we estimate we spent about $500 on supplies, including all the ingredients, gum paste, cake pan and leveler, and the silicone mold compound for the sugar plates (which was the biggest single expense).

Introduction

Two of our dearest friends were getting married and we got to make the cake! Being the incredibly brave and trusting souls that they are, they gave us a free hand. They didn't have any idea what the cake was going to look like until they showed up for the wedding! If that's not trust, I don't know what is!

Naturally, being who we are, we came up with an incredibly complicated and time-consuming concept. We called it the Seasons of Love cake, because our idea involved each tier representing a different season of the year and of the couple's life together. We also tried to flavor each tier to match the season it represented. All four tiers were made with the same chocolate cake recipe, but my sister came up with the great idea to add different flavorings to the batter for each season. We also used a different filling for each layer, as follows.

Winter - Chocolate cake with chocolate chips added to the batter with a mint chocolate ganache filling

Autumn - Chocolate cake with hazelnuts added to the batter with a chocolate hazelnut spread filling

Summer - Chocolate cake with orange zest added to the batter with a cherry jam filling

Spring - Chocolate cake with orange zest added to the batter with an orange marmalade filling

Each tier of the cake was to be topped with a sculpted sugar plate appropriate to the season, then the sides wrapped with seasonally appropriate leaves, flowers, etc. as follows.

Winter - Blue snowflake sugar plate with royal icing snowflakes around the sides

Autumn - Red leaf sugar plate with gum paste autumn leaves around the sides

Summer - Green lily pad sugar plate with gum paste lily pads and lilies around the sides

Spring - Yellow flower sugar plate with gum paste gerbera daisies around the sides

Each tier also got a symbolic bride and groom in the form of a pair of life-size little animals sitting on the sugar plate.

Winter - Pygmy yeti

Autumn - Dragonflies

Summer - Frogs

Spring - Caterpillars

The final touch was to involve a giant gum paste flower blooming out of the top of the cake.

In case all of that doesn't sound like enough, I also came up with a structural design for the cake wherein each layer was cantilevered out from the layer underneath so that it appeared to defy gravity.

I think trying to give you a straight, chronological report of our cake-creating activities would be more confusing than anything else, so I've divided my narrative into sections each describing one aspect of the project. I'll warn you now; it's a pretty long narrative. Enter at your own risk! 

Baking, Torting, and Filling

Baking all the cake was pretty much an all-day project (and that's not even counting the enormous shopping trip the day before. Who would have imagined anyone could ever need so much butter?) The smallest tier, the spring tier, was 6"in diameter, summer was 8", autumn 10", and winter 12", so I had to bake two 2" high cakes in each of those sizes for a total of eight cakes, which adds up to a whole lot of cake batter!

Fortunately for me we had decided to make all four layers using the same basic cake recipe so I was able to mix a lot of batter at one time and I never had to wash out the mixer between batches. This meant that I had to add the extra ingredients (chocolate chips, hazelnuts, or orange zest) to the batter by hand

.It all went remarkably smoothly (especially for such a huge project involving me and a kitchen) and eight hours later I had a fridge full of carefully wrapped cakes and a mountain of chocolate-covered dishes.

Torting, filling, and frosting the cakes, however, turned out to be more time-consuming than we could ever have imagined. Fortunately for me, my sister handled that part of it.

The first step is to level off the top of each cake, for which purpose we bought a special cake-leveling tool, which is like a fine saw turned sideways with feet on it. We thought this would be easier to do when the cakes were cold because then they don't crumble as much but this turned out not to be the case at all. Apparently our cakes were too cold, because our saw wouldn't go through the cake at all the first time we tried it straight out of the freezer. So we let the cakes thaw and tried again with much greater success. We still had to be careful on the larger tiers not to let the cake distort the blade of our tool, which happened if we tried to work too quickly. We found it worked best if my sister held the saw while I held and rotated the cake. After each piece was level on top we had to go through the same process again to split each cake in half, giving us four thin layers of cake per tier between which we could spread our fillings.

The first step in assembling those four separate pieces into an entire tier is to stick the bottom layer onto the cardboard base with a little bit of buttercream icing. Then my sister piped a thick dam of buttercream icing around the edge of that layer to hold in the filling. The filling can then be spread on the cake without fear of it leaking over the sides. The next layer of cake is placed on top of this and pressed down firmly, then the process is repeated until all four layers are in place.

Her next step was to put a crumb coat on each tier. This is a preliminary undercoat of icing to keep the crumbs from the cake from getting into the final icing coat. She decided to use a glaze of apricot jam for this, which she made by heating the jam and then pressing it through a sieve to remove the stringy bits. Applied with a pastry brush in a thin layer, it picks up the stray crumbs and keeps then in place when it dries. In retrospect, it would have been a better idea to use thinned buttercream icing for this, since we had some trouble with the dark cake showing through the icing.

While I'm on the subject of buttercream icing, I should add a sidebar here about my sister’s experiments with buttercream icing. One flaw that buttercream icing has is that, because it is made with butter, it isn't truly white. Buttercream icing can be made with Crisco instead, which does make it white, but it doesn't taste as good. To decide the best way to make the buttercream icing for this cake, she made several batches with slight variations such as using a very light colored butter, or using Crisco but with artificial clear butter flavoring, or adding a bit of white food coloring to icing made with regular butter. We decided that the loss of taste wasn't worth the loss of color and decided against using the Crisco. There was only a very slight color difference anyway.

Once the crumb coat dried, she went back to each tier with a layer of buttercream icing. Unfortunately, you could still see the cake through the first layer of icing, and she had some trouble with the second layer sagging and dripping. But she cleaned it all up and the resulting cake tiers were by far the neatest cake tiers we've ever frosted, though I will say that my sister didn't make it look quite as easy as Sandy, our instructor at our Wilton master class in cake decorating. I'll bet she will next time, though.

Gravity-defying Structure

I was determined to make this a cake that defied, or appeared to defy, gravity. I'd like to be able to claim that it was some kind of metaphor for the happy couple's love defying the pressures of life that weigh us all down or some such sentimental hoo-hah, but really, I think it was just because I was convinced I could do it and thought that would be really cool.

The result - my plan for a cake on which each tier sat only halfway on the tier beneath, the other half cantilevered out in an attractive spiral. I hope to one day adapt this design to allow me to render a strand of DNA in cake. For a while I contemplated having each layer actually next to the previous layer, and slightly elevated, not sitting on top of it at all. While I still believe this to be theoretically possible, I'm glad I didn't try it this time because this way was hard enough.

Each tier was to be supported by a circle of 1/2" foamcore, on top of which would rest the cardboard base of each tier, on top of which rested the actual cake. To hold them in place, each tier had to be bolted to the foamcore base of the tier beneath. This necessitated some complicated and mystical-looking hole cutting in each piece of foamcore to allow both for the bolts themselves and for various bolt heads and bolt ends from the layers above and below. I felt like a sorcerer, which is always a good thing to feel like.

The assembly of the cake was an arduous and nerve-wracking process. Each tier was individually torted and frosted by my sister in advance. Then we started with the large, wooden, circular base, which already had holes drilled for the two bolts to hold the second tier. The heads were also countersunk to allow the base to sit flat on the table. The bolts were inserted first, then the largest tier of the cake, with holes precut in its cardboard base, was lowered into place over the bolts, which, for sanitary reasons, we wrapped in plastic wrap, though we also washed them well first. Next we positioned the foamcore base for the second tier and marked on the first tier where it would sit because we had to insert some 1/4" wooden dowels into the first tier of the cake to support the weight of the tier above. Otherwise, each tier would crush the tier beneath and the entire cake would collapse. I put nine or ten dowels into the fist tier of the cake, arrayed evenly about an inch back from the edge of the area where the next tier would sit. That done, we were ready to bolt the foamcore for the second tier into place. By the way, a cake that requires a crescent wrench to assemble is very funny.

The foamcore base of the second tier already had the bolts to go through to the next tier in it at this point. In fact some of the bolts had to be glued in place in advance because the layers of foamcore were covered with gold foil and the bolts had to be in place before that in order for the heads to be hidden. Therefore, we were all set to lower the second tier onto those bolts and repeat the process described above for the third and fourth tiers. Bear in mind that this entire time, despite my professed confidence in my design, I was pretty much expecting the cake to collapse at any moment.

Miraculously, it all went together and appeared to be stable! We propped it up with temporary dowel supports to make sure and later we went out to get some attractive clear plastic supports from TAP Plastics, which we used for transport and actually had to put back in as a precautionary measure halfway through the reception. The layers did begin to settle and tip a bit, which I suspect indicates that the dowels were being tipped over inside the layers. I'm sure I could solve this problem next time by using an internal support with a wider base, like a plastic ring or oval. All in all, I'd say my first foray into the world of gravity-defying pastry was a roaring success!

Sugar Plates

Each layer of the cake is topped with a seasonally appropriate giant sugar plate - a blue snowflake for winter, a red leaf for fall, a green lily pad for summer, a yellow flower for spring. Modern technology being the marvelous thing that it is, ordinary people like you and I are now able to make our very own rubber, food-safe hard candy molds in the comfort of our own homes! Amazing, isn't it? We purchased five pounds of a two-part, food-safe rubber mold compound from a site called chefrubber.com, which, by the way, has all kinds of products that look super fun.

Our first step was to try out our new toy. I made a little leaf out of non-toxic clay and put it in the bottom of a paper cup. We tried out the rubber, carefully mixing the correct proportion using my sister-in-law's kitchen scale and it worked great! First we painted a thin layer of rubber onto the clay positive with a soft brush to make sure it got into all the little crevices, then we poured more rubber on top of that. The pouring process was a bit difficult, as in order to avoid getting bubbles in the mold, we had to pour the rubber in a very thin stream out a tiny hole in the mixing cup. The mold dried sturdy and detailed, and it pulled away easily from both the cup and the clay. We make some hard candy and poured it into the mold once again with great success! The candy took all the fine detail of the mold and then peeled away easily once it cooled.

Emboldened by our success, I sat down to sculpt each of the large plates for the cake, again out of non-toxic clay, on sheets of foamcore. Once they were complete, I built up foamcore walls around each to contain the poured rubber, filling in some large spaces with excess clay, to minimize the amount of rubber needed to fill the mold box.

My sister was at work the day I had chosen as my mold-pouring extravaganza so I was left on my own with a fairly nerve-wracking procedure to perform, but I bravely rose to the challenge. My first mistake was trying to mix too much of the compound at once. Although it doesn't completely cure for 24 hours, it starts to set up after only about half an hour. If that seems like plenty of time to pour out a paper cup of rubber, bear in mind that I was pouring it through a pinhole. It's pretty time consuming. Also that I had to paint on a coat of the rubber before I could start pouring. So my first batch started to set before I was done pouring, resulting in me desperately ripping larger and larger holes in the side of my paper bucket until finally I gave up and just poured it over the side. (If you're wondering why I didn't just scrap that batch of rubber and start over, it was because I wasn't sure I would have enough to do all four molds and so I couldn't afford to waste any. It's not something I could just run out to the grocery store and buy more of.) This did, indeed result in quite a few bubbles. I popped the larger ones with a pin and, as always, hoped for the best.

The rest of the pouring went better, as I worked in smaller batches, though I was also worried by one batch that I didn't quite mix as well as I should have, but it seemed to set up with no adverse effects. By the end I was such a pro that I was pouring rubber into one mold box with one hand while painting rubber onto another clay positive with the other hand. I even took pictures with my right hand of my left hand pouring the rubber into the mold box.

An anxious day followed until I could safely pull the molds off of the clay positives, but it was worth the wait. The molds looked great! We washed them with soap and water, as per the instructions and we were ready to the pour the sugar plates.

My original plan had been to pour each plate in two different colors so, for instance, the autumn leaves would be a light gold in the veins and darker amber in the areas in between. I expected that the second color of sugar, poured over the first, would melt the first color and the two would blend smoothly together. Boy, was I wrong. I tried this experiment first on the autumn leaf and it didn't work at all. Not only did the two colors not blend together at all, but the second color didn't flow all the way in next to the first color, so I had big ugly grooves on my sugar plate. I decided to try it with just one color.

Not only did this produce a nice, clean leaf, but it was also much faster, easier, less wasteful of sugar and it even produced some of the bi-tonal effect I was looking for all on its own. Because sugar is translucent and the molds were of various thicknesses, the deep areas looked much darker than the shallow areas. I was really pleased with the result.

I proceeded to pour the yellow flower and the green lily pad this way, which brought me finally to the largest sugar plate, the snowflake. Now, we wanted the snowflake to be a very pale blue, just a hint of color, really. To accomplish this with sugar would be very difficult because cooked sugar always has a bit of an amber tint. We decided to try using a clear sugar substitute called isomalt, which we learned about at a Pulled Sugar class we took recently. Isomalt is pretty amazing stuff. It comes in the form of opaque white crystals, larger than sugar crystals and you don't need to add water or anything or even stir it while it melts. It won't burn the way sugar will and, unlike sugar, it's perfectly clear. You also have to heat it to a much higher temperature than sugar, which was a little scary, especially since I was stupid enough to do this barefoot, instead of wearing my steel-toed boots, which should have been the obvious thing to do, considering that this process involved me carrying a pot of 400 degree liquid from the kitchen to the garage. Fortunately, the whole thing went without mishap, although I was shocked by how quickly the isomalt heated up. It didn't behave the way sugar does at all, which I suppose is to be expected. I tinted the melted isomalt with just a smidge of blue food coloring and poured the snowflake, which turned out beautifully.

For the finishing touch I rubbed each sugar plate once over with a damp cloth to give it a glossy finish. They had a sort of frosted glass look when they first came out of the molds, which was also nice, but the advantage of the glossy finish is that then if you later drop icing or something onto the sugar plate (which my sister and I considered to be more or less inevitable), you can wipe it off without damaging the finish of the plate.

Side Decorations

Winter

The sides of the winter layer called for royal icing snowflakes. The first step, as always, was to find suitable research photos, so I went online until I had more pictures of snowflakes than anyone should be able to use in a lifetime. Using these as a reference, I drew up six different snowflake patterns. These I taped to a cookie sheet then covered with wax paper. Using a #3 decorating tip, I piped royal icing over each pattern, then sprinkled it with edible glitter (clear, silver, or blue) before the frosting had a chance to dry.

These proved to be extremely popular with the children at the wedding, who kept coming back to the kitchen asking for "snowflake candy." Fortunately, I made about twice as many as I actually needed for the cake, because I was afraid of breakages, so there were plenty to go round. There was one extremely sad incident involving the four-year-old daughter of a good friend of ours, whose piece of snowflake candy fell on the ground and broke. To make up for it I made snowflake candy again (in a slightly sturdier form) to serve at a dinner party that they were coming to a few days later, but unfortunately at the last minute they couldn't make it, so we put the snowflakes in bowls of ice cream and served them to the other guests, which also proved to be quite popular, even among the adults.

Autumn

For the sides of the autumn layer I made large gum paste leaves. Actually, they were a little larger than would really have been optimal, but oh well. I didn't have any gum paste cutters big enough to do the job, so I drew myself a paper pattern and cut each leaf out by hand, then drew in veins with a knife tool. All of my flower formers were also too small for these leaves, so I made my own out of the sides of a cereal box taped to a cookie sheet to get the curve I wanted. Once they were generously dusted with cornstarch to prevent sticking the leaves were draped over these to dry.

I started with three different colors of gum paste - orange, red, and brown. Once the leaves were dry I went in and added more color variations with chalk pastels - various reds, yellows, browns, oranges, and greens until each leaf was different. I steamed them to set the colors (a neat trick, by the way. You just set a kettle or pot of water boiling and wave the leaf for a few seconds in front of the steam. It keeps the colors from rubbing off and gives it a nice sheen.) For the finishing touch, my sister dusted them with gold luster dust.

Summer

For the summer layer, my sister made gum paste lily pads and I made a few gum paste lilies to go with them.

The lily pads are made of green gum paste, rolled thin, then cut into a circle with a little wedge cut out. My sister then drew in veins and softened the edges with a ball tool. Once the lily pads were dry, we painted them with some thinned green piping gel so they would have the shiny, wet look of a real lily pad.

For the lilies my sister first made yellow centers around green floral wire. (We were following instructions in our gum paste flower book, but they were a little unclear sometimes, so she actually made them far too large the first time and had to do it over.) Once those were dry, she then cut daisy shapes out of yellow gum paste, softened the edges and added veins on the inside, and then built up the interior yellow petals from the inside out on top of the round center. These were left to dry upside down for a day or so.

Once these were dry I got some white gum paste to make the outer petals and some coffee cups covered with tin foil with a hole punched in the middle to assemble the flowers on. The white outer petals of the lilies are assembled from the outside in, so I made the largest petals first, cutting out the gum paste with one of my cutters, and adding veins with a knife tool. The first row of petals lies on the tin foil, arranged around the center hole, making sure to leave the hole exposed. The next layer of petals goes on top of that, glued with meringue powder, staggered and supported by cotton balls so as to give the petals the necessary lift and curve. This goes on until the flower is pretty much filled up, then the center is dropped into place with the wire going through the hole in the tin foil. The hardest part was not gluing the cotton balls to the flower. I didn't entirely succeed in all cases.

Once these dried, I pried all the cotton balls out, then added a little pink chalk pastel to the tips of each flower petal and the lilies were ready to go. The nice thing about the wire is that they can easily be stuck straight into the side of the cake.

Spring

We chose what might well be the most time-consuming flower in the universe for the spring layer of the cake - the gerbera daisy. Somehow, my sister got stuck with all the tedious, boring jobs, like making millions of tiny daisy petals and I got to have all the exciting jobs like pouring boiling sugar into rubber molds and sculpting yeti out of gum paste. I didn't plan that deliberately, by the way, but I'm also not complaining.

Like the water lilies, she started with forming a center on top of some stiff floral wire, since it needed to be strong enough to support the weight of all the petals. After the center dried, she wrapped it several times with orange gum paste rolled very thin with the edge scored and tiny pieces of very thin floral wire pressed gently into gum paste. This created little stamens around the center. Once that dried, she colored it with non-toxic chalk pastel powder (created by grating the pastels through a sieve).

Along the way, she worked on making the roughly 75 large and 75 small petals required for the 5 daisies. Each one was cut from orange gum paste using a large daisy cutter. She thinned the edges and elongated them to make a more natural shape, then pressed veins down the center. Using meringue powder and water, she attached the petal to short length of very thin floral wire and let it dry on flower former to create a nice curve. The instructions actually called for inserting the wire inside the petal, but when we tried that it seemed very awkward and required rolling thicker petals than we wanted. Once the petals were dry, she brushed them with several shades of orange chalk pastel, and then set the color by briefly holding them over boiling water. The steam also gave them a nice sheen.

Finally, she was ready to assemble the flowers! First, she dipped the tips of the stamens in meringue powder and water and then dipped them into gold edible glitter. Then she attached the petals to the center stem with the small ones closer to the center. As a final touch, she brushed the petals with gold lustre dust.

Bride & Groom Figures

Rather than content ourselves with just one happy couple on the top of the cake, we decided to put a "bride and groom" on each tier of the cake. In keeping with our nature and seasons themes, we set about to select an animal appropriate to each season. Once we had come up with caterpillars for the spring layer, frogs for the summer layer, and dragonflies for the autumn layer we ran into a problem - each of the aforementioned animals can be sculpted and put on a cake full scale, which for some reason I thought was really important and my sister at least humored me, but we were unable to think of a winter animal which would fit on the cake in full scale. Penguins and polar bear were right out, of course, and though we may have been able to come up with some sort of winter mouse, we still weren't satisfied. Then it hit us - pygmy yeti! What could be more perfect? Due to its small size, the pygmy yeti is even more elusive than its larger, more famous cousins such as the migo, the sasquatsch, Bigfoot, and, of course, the standard yeti. In fact, it has yet to be proved that the curious little critter exists outside of this cake and our imaginations, but, if it does, rest assured that it is the same size as the ones I sculpted for this cake. Many of the wedding guests erroneously assumed that I had created small-scale versions of regular yeti, but that just goes to show you the abysmal state of yeti education in this country. That's education about yeti, not education directed at yeti, by the way, though I imagine that a lot of progress could probably be made in that area as well.

Spring - Caterpillars

We decided on these little green caterpillars because they would stand out nicely on the yellow sugar flower. I always like to have a research photo to work from, so I found a good one with a google image search. These were by far the easiest critters to create. I simply rolled a cylinder of gum paste, and then created the segments with a plastic knife tool from my rolled fondant set. The little spots are made by gently pushing a round decorating tip into the gum paste. I believe I used a #3. A little rolled string of gum paste stuck to the head created the antennae and then the caterpillars were set (arranged in what I hope was a graceful curve) on a large flower former, generously dusted with cornstarch to prevent sticking, to dry. The flower former lifted the front half of the caterpillars off the ground, so when they were set on the cake, they were rearing up the air and twined together. A few dabs of royal icing with a #1 tip created the tiny feet.

Once everything was dry, I painted them with paste food colors, thinned with water. The only tricky part is not to work one area over too much because it dissolves the gum paste. Just paint one quick coat, then set them aside to dry. I also did a little light dusting of chalk pastel once the food coloring dried to give them a more natural look and to make the two caterpillars look slightly different in color and in shade from each other, which I thought would be more realistic.

Summer - Frogs

I made the frog bodies and the legs separately, then glued them together with meringue powder once they had dried. One of the gum paste books we were using for reference actually had a picture of a gum paste frog, though it didn't have directions on how to make it. It did, however, provide me with the tip that bulging eyes could be made by pressing a decorating tip into the gum paste, which worked great! I believe I used a #8 for the eyes and a #5 for what I think are ears, directly behind the eyes. I also used a #16 star tip to make the rough skin texture on the frogs' backs. The mouth and the little lines on the back were done with the knife tool. I had to do all this pretty quickly because gum paste has a very short working time before it dries out and starts to crack.

That pretty much did it for the bodies, so I set to work on the legs. The back legs didn't need any reinforcement, but I had to put little #32 wires into the front legs, so they would be strong enough to hold the frog bodies up off the ground a bit.

Once the frogs were dry and the pieces glued together, I painted them with paste food colors. I thought about making them red, so they'd contrast with their green sugar lily pad, but we decided against that because we though red frogs might look poisonous and went with standard green instead. First I painted the undersides a yellow ochre (again, working from research I found online) and let that dry before painting the tops green. I used a slightly different shade of green for each frog, so they wouldn't look identical. The eyeballs I painted red, then added a black iris once the red was dry. As with the caterpillars, I added a dusting of chalk pastel to soften the bright green of the food coloring and add a bit of shadow and highlight.

Autumn - Dragonflies

Our gum paste book actually did have directions for making a dragonfly, so I just followed those and used their picture as a reference. The bodies were made much the same way as the caterpillars - a cylinder of gum paste segmented with a plastic knife tool. The shape of the body is slightly different from that of the caterpillars, being rounder and fuller at the head and more tapered at the tail, but the idea is the same. The eyes, like the frogs' eyes, were made with a round decorating tip. The first time I made the wings, following the book's instructions, I wasn't happy with them. Their shape wasn't delicate and specific enough because I had flattened them with the rolling pin again after cutting them out. Also, the wire inside the wings made it impossible to get them as flat as I wanted them to be. I trashed the first set of wings and started again. This time I didn't put wires inside and it worked a lot better. I also rolled the gum paste thinner, cut out a specific shape using a pattern I made out of paper, then carefully thinned only the lower edge with a ball tool. Finally happy with the wings, I set everything aside to dry.

Next, I painted delicate veins on both sides of the wings with blue food coloring. I also painted the bodies with blue food coloring, a slightly different shade for each dragonfly, and added darker shading between each segment with black food coloring. Tiny feelers were added with royal icing and a #1 decorating tip, and the eyes were painted with black piping gel to make them glossy.

The wings were glued to the bodies with meringue powder. One fell off when I was positioning them on the cake, but I glued it back on. A light dusting of blue luster dust on the wings gave them that little extra shine. Amazingly, the dragonflies were even sturdy enough for one guest to take one home to keep.

Winter – Pygmy Yeti

The pygmy yeti were by far the most time consuming creatures to make, plus I didn't have any reference to work from, so I had to make it up as I went along. In order to make them stand upright without collapsing under their own weight, I gave the yeti internal wire frameworks, made from #20 white floral wire. I covered this with fondant in the basic shape of a yeti body. I chose fondant instead of gum paste because it has a much longer working time before it dries out than gum paste and I didn't want to have to rush.

The face, hands, and feet are gum paste, colored a nice, rich, yeti-skin brown. I could only do one extremity at a time, then I had to wait for that one to dry before making the next one, so it was quite a drawn out process. At first I had a lot of trouble with the gum paste drying out too quickly (I didn't have the option of using fondant here, because fondant doesn't take fine detail as well as gum paste.), but I discovered that it I kept dipping my plastic sculpting tool in Crisco, it kept the gum paste moist and workable for a longer period of time. I used my own feet as a model (I have surprisingly large feet for someone my size, so they actually made pretty good models for yeti feet.) and I made the toenails and fingernails with #2 and #4 round decorating tips. (Can you tell I really like this new technique I learned?) The feet in particular turned out really well, which is important for such a close relative of Bigfoot, and surprised the heck out of me because I can't draw feet to save my life.

The next step was to give the yeti hair. I toyed with the idea of making the hair out of gum paste, but decided to use royal icing instead. I think I made the right choice. It was another very time-consuming process, but the results were worth it. I drew in each hair individually with a #1 tip and it had to be done in two stages, so that the yeti always had a dry side to lay them down on. I also gave them little royal icing eyebrows and eyeballs.

A dusting of a few grey and blue shades of chalk pastel gave the fur that slightly-dingy-wild-animal look and some pink and ivory chalk pastels on the face, hands, and feet, added highlights and emphasized the toenails and fingernails. I'm not sure how I came to the conclusion that pygmy yeti have red irises, but apparently they do. Those are painted with food coloring.

Originally, I had planned for the yeti to be skipping hand-in-hand, but when I put them together they looked like they were jitterbugging, so I went with that instead. We kept the yeti after the cake cutting to give to the bride and groom when they returned from their honeymoon. 

Blooming Flower Mechanism

Apparently, just making a cake isn't enough for us. No, our cakes have to do something, even if we don't have time to make it work right. Oh well. We went through about four hundred different concepts and in the end we didn't settle on one so much as we went with the one we happened to be working on when the day of the wedding rolled around.

It all started with the concept of a big flower blooming out of the center of the cake. Nice metaphor for the commencement of the happy couple's new life together, right? Right. But it also raises a very important question - what should be inside the flower? Clearly the center of the flower suddenly becomes the most important spot on the cake, so it has to contain something meaningful, right? We were tossing around a lot of different ideas, including Homer and Marge cake toppers and tiny sugar words saying "love" or "joy" or something along those lines, when my sister suddenly hit on the solution we were looking for - a butterfly! This naturally brought up the idea that the butterfly should actually fly out of the flower, which led to the question - how do me make an edible butterfly light enough that it would be lifted by a tiny fan sitting inside the cake? The solution we came up with was to make the butterflies wings out of petals of edible flowers, but I don't actually know if that would have worked or not because fan difficulties prevented us from ever getting as far as actually making the butterfly.

The first fan I tried was one of the little ones you can buy at Radio Shack to cool computers, which was just the right size to fir inside the cake, but, as it turned out, wasn't even powerful enough to launch edible glitter into the air, let alone flower petals or an edible butterfly. So I set out to look for another fan, but with little success. Fans powerful enough were too big and had to be plugged in, fans small enough and battery-powered were too weak. On the day of the wedding I went to a nail salon to get a manicure and pedicure and at every manicure station was a tiny fan, just the right size, for drying nails in front of, but by the then it was too late. Live and learn. I'll remember it for next time.

At this point I came up with another plan. Instead of using a fan, I'd make the center of the flower out of a piece of balloon, which would be stretched as the flower raised up, then released, thereby launching the flower petals and edible glitter inside into the air. We had to give up on the butterfly at this point because this launch mechanism would have resulted in an apparently dead butterfly catapulting into the air, and then smashing into one of the lower tiers of the cake, possibly taking out a frog or a dragonfly in the process.

Finally having a plan in hand that I had good reason to believe would work, I set about making the petals of the large flower, which was to bloom out of the cake. I made six, to be safe, though I only planned to use five. They needed wires inside to hold them to the center and to strengthen them, so I made two sides of each petal, and then glued them together with wires sandwiched in between. Each petal was made by rolling out the gum paste, cutting it out using a paper pattern I had drawn, then softening the edges with a ball tool and drawing in subtle ridges with a dogbone tool. I then set them on a flower former dusted with cornstarch to dry.

Once the petals were completed, I made the discovery that they were way, way too big to fit in the tube we were using and they had altogether the wrong curve to them, which wasn't as upsetting as it might have been because I had, for some inexplicable reason, painted all these petals with hideous bright pinks and yellows. I don't pretend to know what I was thinking when I did that. I'd like to be able to claim that I was under some sort of evil outside influence, but no, it was all my fault. In any event, it's just as well that I couldn't use those petals.

While I'm hovering near the subject of the cardboard tube, I've got a funny story about that, too. My sister and I were trying to figure out where we were going to find a tube the right size to use in our mechanism. We had some mailing tubes, but they were a little too small. Suddenly, in a blinding flash, inspiration smacked me upside the head. "Oatmeal!" I yelled, and rushed to the kitchen, my sister hot on my heels, where I triumphantly extracted from the cabinet a cylindrical container of oatmeal, which turned out to be much too big for our purposes. This did, however, put us onto the track of food containers, and my sister soon returned from the grocery store with a container of cashews, which was just the right size. Several hours later, after we had eaten half the cashews, my sister realized that the cashew container was exactly the same size as the container in which the gum paste mix is packaged. We had three of these in the house the entire time. Obviously we aren't the most observant people in the history of the universe, or maybe we just need to learn to think things through for a few minutes before rushing off in pursuit of something that was right in front of our noses the whole time.

Returning to the topic of the petals, I started over with a new, much smaller petal pattern and this time I curved them the correct way to make them actually fit inside the tube. Once they were dry and their support wires were safely sandwiched in between the two layers of the petals, I set about coloring them. Mindful of past mistakes, I decided to color them with chalk pastels instead of food coloring, allowing for much more natural colors and smoother color blends. I went with a blue and purple color scheme on the bottom of the petals and a yellow and orange scheme on the tops. Remember, it's an idealized fantasy flower. I can make it any color I want. So there. I also added some greens at the bottom of each petal for a more natural stem to petal transition. Then I steamed all the petals to set the colors and make them a little shiny (a trick we learned at our Wilton master class in cake decorating we took last spring.)

With the petals complete, I had only to create the launch mechanism. I first made a ring of several layers of thick floral wire. To this, I taped a cut section of balloon, in which to place the glitter. At this point, we reached the hilarious realization that my launch mechanism looked like a giant condom, but I didn't let that deter me. I attached a wooden dowel handle to the giant condom, then wrapped the wires inside the flower petals into the wires around the perimeter of the condom and the flower was ready to be installed in the cake.

In order for that to happen I had to carve out a large circle in the center of the top tier of the cake. Well, not in the center, actually. It was more off to one side because I convinced my sister that would look more in keeping with the cantilevered, spiral design of the cake. In retrospect, I don't think I was right about that, but oh well. Even I can't be right all the time. Once I had hollowed out the large circle in the center of the top tier, I inserted the cardboard tube from the cashews (cut down to the right height) into the cake, then carved a groove for the handle of the flower to travel in. At about this point, I realized that the tier was slightly shorter than I had figured on and my petals were too long to fit inside the cake, so I had to take them off the condom, remove the wires, carefully cut off the bottom of each petal, reinsert the wires, and rewire them to the condom. After a surprisingly smooth execution of this procedure, I was ready to insert the flower in the cake.

In order for the glitter to be launched into the air, the balloon had to be pulled tight, then released when the flower was lifted up and out of the cake. After experimenting with all manner of clamps and dismembering a little model-making clamp assembly I own, I hit on the solution of putting a tack down through the center of the balloon into the foamcore beneath the cake. This would hold the balloon for a little while until it stretched enough that the hole in the balloon would pass over the head of the tack, releasing the balloon. That done, I poured gold edible glitter into the center of the flower, covered the opening in the sugar flower with a sort of royal icing grid, and prayed for the best.

Assembly

Once the structure of the entire cake was together, it remained only to arrange and attach all of our pre-made decoration. For some reason I expected this to be much easier than it was.

The sugar plates actually were easy - they just plopped right down in place. We wet the icing on top of each tier first to make sure they stuck, but that may not have even been necessary. Incidentally, it would have been quite a neat, elegant looking cake with just the sugar plates and no other decorations.

I then piped bead borders around the top and bottom of each tier to hide various and sundry imperfections, then set about attaching the decorations.

We had decided not to attach the figures or the snowflakes until we arrived at the reception site because we didn't want them to break en route, so I had nothing to do on the winter layer for the moment. Which was fine with me because the autumn layer gave me more than enough trouble for two. It took me while to figure out the best way to arrange the autumn leaves around the side of the autumn tier because they were too tall to really fit under the sugar plate and not curved enough to go to the outside of the sugar plate, which extended in some places several inches beyond the cake. After a few abortive attempts, I settled on angling all the leaves so they would fit under the sugar plate and eventually managed to get them all stuck on with royal icing. (Quite a few of them fell off in the car on the drive to the church, but we just stuck them back on once we arrived.)

The summer layer was much easier, because the lily pads were just the right size, possibly because my sister made those, since everything I made for this cake for some reason came out too big. They stuck on easily and the lilies were laughably easy to stick in between.

Spring was also a breeze (again, my sister made these flowers). The gerbera daisies had big wire bases, which I stuck right into the sides of the cake. I placed a delicate royal icing mesh over the hole in the center of spring's sugar plate out of which the flower was to bloom and spring was finished.

That was it for the home assembly - the rest would have to wait until we arrived at the church, which, by the way, is a saga all by itself. There may be no more stressful car ride in the world than a car ride with a cantilevered cake in the back seat. Fortunately for me, My sister drives a station wagon, while I drive a truck, so she was the logical choice for cake chauffer. Because our plans on the day of the wedding called for her to drive to get the bride while I drove to get plastic supports for the cake we needed to take two separate cars, so I couldn't even be in the car with her to offer to moral support. The best I could do was to give her the occasional thumbs-up when she glanced in the rear view mirror.

Even just moving the cake from our table to the car was scary. It was pretty darn heavy for a cake, let me tell you, and the round board it was sitting on was only a few inches smaller than our door. We got it safely ensconced in my sister's station wagon, on top of some non-slip material to keep it from shifting. To protect it against dust and such we built a box of foamcore around it and, making sure that our temporary dowel rod supports were firmly in place, we were ready to go!

I can't even imagine how nervous my sister must have been, listing to every creak or snap from the back of the car and cringing at every pothole. It was bad enough just following her. We only pulled over once on the forty minute drive to the church when my sister heard a noise which turned out to only be a few of the autumn leaves falling off.

We made it to the church unscathed and it remained only to get it in the building and onto its table, a process that was greatly assisted by the presence in the church kitchen of a rolling cart.

Once the cake was safely in place on the designated cake table (around which the bride and her helpers had erected a lovely ribbon canopy). My sister set about repairing the fallen autumn leaves while I rushed off to the local TAP plastics to get thick plastic rods to use as temporary supports for the cake (much more attractive than the temporary supports we had been using which I made out of dowel rod and foamcore.) I returned to find that the leaves were mended and that my plastic supports were, indeed, quite attractive.

At this point I took over the project of putting the finishing touches on the cake so that my sister (who was also the matron of honor) could scamper off to help the bride prepare. The snowflakes were simple to attach with a little royal icing, as were the various animal couples. I was very careful to position the caterpillars on the top tier so that they wouldn't be crushed by the giant flower when it bloomed out of the cake. That done, I headed out for a well-deserved manicure and pedicure.

Presentation

We kept the plastic supports in place until the ceremony was over (I cried; my sister cried; the bride cried; it was a great success.) and the reception began. Then we took them out and hoped for the best. Everything seemed fine, so we went to enjoy the sangria with little plastic monkeys on the glasses. After about forty-five minutes we checked the cake and decided to put the supports back in as a safety precaution because it had tipped a little bit, but it probably would have been fine without them as it wasn't long after that that we were called upon to serve the cake.

Of course, before the cake was served, the flower had to bloom. Or fail miserably. I couldn't be certain which. We gathered all the guests around the cake where my sister and I described our concept then I warned everyone that, while I hoped the cake was about to do something dramatic, it was possible that it was going to be a complete flop. Then I took hold of the handle and raised the flower. At first, nothing happened. The balloon was too firmly attached to the bottom of the cake and wasn't letting go. A great sigh ran through the assembled celebrants. I gave one last desperate tug and the balloon broke free! Gold glitter spewed into the air and was greeted by cheers! The flower didn't quite make it all the way out, so it only opened part way, but it was a heck of a lot better than nothing.

We pulled the sugar plate off of the top tier so the bride and groom could cut their first piece, then we moved the whole shebang into the kitchen to cut it into servings. We've never cut a cake this big before, but we had a diagram of how it's usually done and I think we did pretty well. I unbolted and disassembled the cake and removed the dowels while my sister and another woman from the church cut the pieces. I also answered questions about gum paste and sugar and isomalt from a few astute young boys who were fascinated by the whole thing and hung around the kitchen the entire time we were serving the cake then took various gum paste flowers and lily pads and such home with them to keep. It's nice to be appreciated.

Our work finally done, we kicked back on a bench in the courtyard to revel in our success, drink sangria, and watch some nearby children make long, beautiful, unintentionally pornographic chains out of the plastic drink monkeys.

For the moment we chose not think about the absolutely giant mess we had waiting for us in the dining room, kitchen, and garage at home.

Resources

We also learned many of our techniques (and had a fabulous time) at the Wilton School in Darien, Illinois. We took the The Master Course, Introduction to Gum Paste, Introduction to Rolled Fondant, and Introduction to Pulled Sugar. Sandy, our Master Course instructor, was one of the best teachers either of us had in any subject.

Chef Rubber

Our source for the food-safe mold making material (we used the Perfect Soft Silicone). They also have a helpful guide to mold making.