Peep and the Big Wide World Cake

When it came time to design my nephew Sam’s second birthday cake, I turned to Sam’s older sister, Alex, to help me conceptualize the cake. Sam, while remarkably verbal for a two-year-old, still cannot be relied up to respond to specific questions in a direct manner.

At first, Alex suggested various vehicle-based concepts because Alex loves vehicles. Eventually, I was able to convince Alex that we should base the cake design primarily on things that Sam likes, which may not correlate directly to things that Alex likes. At this point, Alex came up with the idea that Sam might like a duck cake, which I thought was a very good idea. Sam loves animals of all kinds. After further discussion, I suggested that we should make a cake based on the TV show Peep and the Big Wide World, which could include not only Quack (a duck), but also Peep (a chick) and Chirp (a baby bird). Since Quack is very much attached to his pond, I decided that it would be fun to make Quack float in a lake of blue Kool-Aid. As it turns out, blue Kool-Aid is difficult to find, but Gatorade makes an absolutely disgusting flavor that was the perfect color for Quack’s pond, so I used that instead.

This is almost the first cake I’ve made that was primarily landscape-based, rather than primarily object- or character-based. Each major character in Peep and the Big Wide World has a special landscape feature with which he or she is associated. Quack has his pond; Chirp perches in her big tree; Peep lives in an old tin can. I also decided to include “the most beautiful flower,” because I really like that episode, and a caterpillar. The caterpillar is a minor character in the show, but Sam had recently said “caterpillar,” which he pronounced something like “patta-putter,” when I was reading to him. I thought this was absolutely adorable and I hoped that, if I put a caterpillar on his cake, he might say it again.

All of this required a great deal of advance work in gum paste and in chocolate. Most of the gum paste work was fairly conventional – cutting leaves and flower petals out of gum paste and draping them over various things to get graceful curves. The can was easily accomplished by wrapping gum paste around an actual tin can.

I was quite proud of Chirp’s tree. Rather than making the tree out of gum paste or fondant, I decided to make it out of chocolate. While I have taken classes in chocolate-work and I frequently make truffles and such, this was my first attempt at making anything this big out of chocolate, at least since the white chocolate rib cage of the Thorax Cake. The first step in casting the tree was to cut the basic shape out of foam core. Then I made a soft bed of cocoa powder by sifting it into a baking tray. I pushed the foam core positive into the cocoa powder to make the negative mold, then piped tempered milk chocolate into the depression in the cocoa powder. Then I flipped the piece of foam core over and did the same thing again to make the other side of the tree. Once those pieces had set, I glued them together with more milk chocolate. After carving off the excess cocoa powder and smoothing out the rough edges with a knife, I was really pleased with the result. And, as it turns out, properly tempered chocolate is much more rigid than my usual building materials of gum paste and fondant. I’m going to have to start incorporating chocolate into my cakes more often.

To create the pond, I bought a big bowl. Then I cut a piece of ½” foam core with a hole in the middle to sit on top of the bowl to support the cake for the land. I also bought a little pump and put it into the pond. The idea was that, if the water was moving, Quack would float around the pond, rather than remaining stationary.

Sculpting the cake into a scenic hilly landscape was easy. Rather than attempting to cover the entire thing in a single piece of fondant, I decided to cover it in a patchwork of various shades of green. This didn’t perfectly mimic the landscape of the show, but I felt that it still captured the cartoony effect.

Installing the tree went remarkably well. I cut a big hole in the cake, poured tempered chocolate into it, and then stuck in the tree. A little more chocolate easily adhered the leaves. It worked perfectly. Have I mentioned that I need to use chocolate more often?

At this point in the project, two days before the birthday party was scheduled, Sam came down with a truly unfortunate case of croup. Sam and his parents spent the day before what was supposed to be his party at the hospital and I spent the day that I had planned to spend finishing Sam’s cake watching Alex and reassuring him that Mommy and Sam would be home soon. Obviously, we cancelled the party. But it was too late not to finish the cake, and the point of the cake was largely to amuse Sam and Alex, rather than our guests, so I decided to finish the cake anyway, even though there was no longer a party at which to serve it.

I had hoped to make Chirp and Peep entirely out of cake, but I discovered that it is basically impossible to make a sphere out of nothing but cake.  So I cut some Styrofoam balls in half, covered them in tin foil, and used those for the bottom half of Peep and Chirp, with only the top half made of cake. I was quite pleased with how well I did in covering 3” diameter spheres in a smooth layer of fondant. I also think I did a pretty good job of capturing Chirp’s characteristic expression of frustration and exhaustion after she has failed in an attempt to fly.

For Quack, the major problem was, of course, how to make him float. My plan was to make the bottom half of Quack out of buoyant foam and the top half out of cake. The first thing I discovered was that, if you make something egg-shaped (ie. Quack) half out of lightweight foam and half out of heavyweight cake and then place it in water, it will immediately flip over so that the heavy cake part is underwater. No good. I addressed this problem by gluing a lot of heavy steel nuts to the bottom of the foam, so that the bottom of Quack outweighed the top. This worked, up to a point, but it also necessitated a higher proportion of foam to cake to make up for the increased weight. Quack ended up only about one quarter cake and three quarters foam.

I also conducted some experiments on the solubility of fondant in water and I discovered that if I coated the fondant covering Quack in Crisco I could reasonably expect him not to dissolve for at least a quarter of an hour.

Assembling all the cake elements proved more problematic than I had anticipated for two reasons. First, my plan to stick the gum paste flower and the gum paste milkweed plant for the caterpillar directly into the cake utterly failed to account for the fact that moist cake rapidly erodes the structural integrity of gum paste. In the end I did manage to get the flower standing, but the caterpillar’s plant was ultimately a lost cause and he wound up just perched on a clump of grass.

Second, I had planned to assemble the cake while Sam napped and my sister took Alex out to the museum. As Alex proved to be utterly uninterested in the museum that day, though, they came home early. At first, this was delightful, as she immediately ran up to the not-yet-completed cake and yelled, “I love it!!!”

Unfortunately, this was also the moment at which several pieces of the cake started to fall apart. Peep fell off her can. The flower and the milkweed plant began to collapse. I began to freak out. So we spent the next hour or so forbidding Alex from approaching the cake. “It’s very, very fragile!” “Please be careful!” “Oh, stay behind the train table, please!” The poor little kid just wanted to look at it. Alex, I’m sorry. I should have been more concerned with you than I was with the cake.

Sam woke up at about the moment that I finally managed to get the cake assembled and properly accessorized with gum paste rocks and gum paste tufts of grass. Because I was convinced that several components were about to collapse, we rushed to serve the cake, making this an extremely short-lived object, even by cake standards.

I slightly overfilled Quack’s pond with Gatorade, so that when I actually put Quack in the pond and turned on the pump to agitate the water, it overflowed a bit onto the floor. Other than that, Quack’s floating worked remarkably well. He was a little askew, but he definitely floated, and we were even able to light the two candles that I had adhered to his feet. Remarkably, the bit of cake inside of Quack even remained undamaged and edible.

Poor Sam was probably still recovering from his croup and had just woken up, so he didn’t seem terribly impressed. I’m not sure he understood that it was cake until I dissected Chirp and actually put the cake in front of him. Then he was happy. Sam loves cake. After he finished eating Chirp, he even asked, very sweetly, for “more cake, please?” Happy birthday, Sam!

Zoom! Boom! Bully Cake

Those of you who don’t happen to be immersed in the magical world of three- to five-year-old children are probably not familiar with John Scieszka’s Trucktown. So I recommend that you follow the link so you know what the heck I’m talking about.

My personal favorite book in the Trucktown series is actually Smash! Crash!, but since the occasion for this cake was my niece Alex’s fourth birthday, Zoom! Boom! Bully was a more appropriate reference. The basic plot is that various denizens of Trucktown stack up crate, barrels, and tires in the middle of the street, but are periodically disrupted by the aptly named Big Rig smashing into them (Zoom! Boom!). The other trucks then exclaim about what a bully Big Rig is. The big surprise in the end is that it’s Big Rig’s birthday and the other trucks are making him a birthday cake out of the crates, barrels, and tires, which Melvin the cement mixer then pours cement “icing” on. Big Rig, very touched by the other trucks’ thoughtful gesture, picks up the “cake”, takes it back to his garage, and proceeds to gleefully smash it while wearing a festive yellow party hat.

I decided to recreate the penultimate moment of the book in cake form, consisting of three components:

1)    The “cake” made of tires, crate, and barrels.

2)    Melvin the cement mixer, with a rotating drum in the process of dumping cement onto the “cake”.

3)    Big Rig, who would smash face first into the “cake”.

When I explained this concept to Alex she was very enthusiastic, if a bit disappointed that Jack Truck and Dump Truck Dan wouldn’t be on the cake.

The first thing I had to do was figure out how the heck I was going to make any of this happen. The easiest way to describe the process is probably to take each piece separately, though of course these projects were running concurrently.

Melvin the Cement Mixer

I learned a lot about cement mixer drums. The first thing I learned was that it’s very difficult to find detailed schematics of them on the internet. Eventually I resorted to studying Alex’s toy cement mixer. As far as I’ve been able to determine from these authoritative sources, cement mixer drum interiors consist of a series of semicircles, angled and staggered such that when the drum turns one way the cement is propelled towards the bottom of the drum and when it turns the other way the cement is pushed up and out the chute.

I made a whole series of Bristol board mockups with various sizes and densities of semicircles, trying them out using little pieces of paper as a cement substitute. None of them even came close to working. So I branched out and tried some other variations on the internal structure. Finally I settled on a helical arrangement of triangular wedges spiraling up towards the top of the drum. This seemed to at least sort of work.

With the basic structure settled, it was time to remake the drum in gum paste. The exterior of the drum was made in three pieces around Bristol board forms. Once these and the myriad little triangular wedges were dry, I assembled them with royal icing around a brass tube for the center support. Assembly was a lengthy process, as I had to wait for the icing on each wedge to dry before attaching the next one.

With the drum assembled around the central tube, I superglued the tube to the shaft of a reversible gear head motor (once I had figured out how to wire up the motor to make it reversible.) Mounting the drum and motor assembly to the base was a real challenge. I had made a pretty simple base for Melvin out of a cut-up aluminum baking sheet, covered with gum paste, and elevated off the wooden base for the entire cake with L-brackets, so the body of the truck would ultimately appear to be resting on its tires. In Zoom! Boom! Bully, Melvin’s drum appears to be supported from beneath in the middle by two angled beams, but there doesn’t seem to be a support for the back of the drum. This, of course, also raises the question of what Melvin’s rear chute is attached to.

My plan was to build the side support beams out of gum paste around pieces of brass, bolted to the aluminum base. Because, unlike the people illustrating the book, I physically needed something on the back to support both the drum and the chute, I decided on a brass ring mounted on a strip of brass and wrapped in gum paste, also bolted to the aluminum base.

The first time that I put this all together with the motor and the gum paste drum, I set it up so that the lowest point on the drum was resting on the aluminum base, on which I had put some UHMW tape to keep friction to a minimum. I thought that this would help to support the weight of the drum and keep stress off the motor. This turned out to be a very bad plan, as I had failed to account for the fact that, in spite of my best efforts, I had failed to center the drum perfectly on the central brass tube. This meant that when I turned the motor on, as soon as the part of the drum that was slightly further from the axis of rotation got around to the bottom, it jammed against the base. I turned the motor off as soon as I realized what has happened, but not soon enough. As the central brass tube was still trying to rotate while the drum itself was jammed against the base, the royal icing connected the gum paste drum pieces to the brass tube cracked. D’oh!

A few tense hours and one major royal icing repair later, the drum was reattached to the tube. In order to prevent this from happening again, I made a new, slightly higher brass ring to support the back of the drum and raised the motor, and therefore the front of the drum, about a half an inch as well. That way, the drum never touched the actual aluminum base and was supported only by the motor on one end and the brass ring on the other end. It worked!

Once the drum turning mechanism was in place, finishing the back of the truck was relatively simple. I covered the motor in green gum paste and assembled the gum paste pieces of the side support beams. Having previously made tires out of black fondant and hubcaps out of gum paste, sprayed silver, it was easy to attach these, as well as the gum paste wheel wells.

I had also wired up some white LEDs to use for Melvin’s taillights and headlights, so I put the LEDs for the taillights in place and then ran the wires underneath the aluminum base so they’d be in place for the headlights once I got his head assembled. The taillights themselves I made out of gum paste cylinders, capped with rice paper (to diffuse the light) and yellow gelatin (to give the light the correct hue.) In the past, when I’ve needed sheet gelatin (see the Tardis Cake and the Flying Saucer Cake) I’ve used the pre-made kind, but since that has a strange diamond pattern on it, this time I tried making my own flat sheet gelatin, using these instructions that I found on the internet. After a few abortive efforts, it worked pretty well.

Assembling the chute took a little time, because it was made of six separate pieces, which had to be attached one at a time, with sufficient time for the connective royal icing to dry before attaching the next one.

With the back of Melvin thus complete, I had to make his head, the only part of Melvin that contained actual cake. This went very smoothly. Having made all the exterior gum paste pieces in advance, it was simply a matter of carving the cake into the appropriate shape, covering it with fondant, and then setting it in place on the aluminum base. Then I could assemble the gum paste exterior with royal icing, including more tires and wheel wells, the ears / side view mirrors, and eyeglasses / headlights (which were assembled around the rest of the strand of LEDs.) To fill gaps and hide seams, I used royal icing, smoothed with a damp paintbrush.

For cement, I made some white chocolate ganache, tinted grey with black powdered food coloring. Mind you, at this point I still didn’t know whether the drum was properly configured to actually push the cement out and down the tube, and I wouldn’t find out until the party.

Big Rig

My biggest challenge of this cake was figuring out how to make Big Rig roll. It was also pretty high pressure because, let’s face it, if Big Rig didn’t smash into the “cake” the whole project would pretty much be a blatant failure. With almost all of my cakes, I accept that there is a fairly high probability that it might not work as I intend. My philosophy is that if you always know that what you’re doing will work, you’re not trying hard enough. Which is fine when the only people who are going to be disappointed with a failure are me, or my adult friends, or the guests at my friends’ wedding. But I really didn’t want to disappoint Alex. So in this particular case, I really couldn’t let failure be an option.

Keeping Big Rig on the right trajectory was the easy part. I attached two L-brackets to the bottom of Big Rig’s aluminum base, a material which I had selected to keep his weight as low as possible. Then I cut a track in the plywood base for the entire cake, running from the far end where Big Rig would start, leading to the end of the base where the “cake” would sit. That way, the L-brackets, slotted into the plywood track, which I had lined with UHMW tape to reduce friction, would keep Big Rig on target to the “cake.” All I had to do was get him to move.

My first attempt at a drive mechanism was to connect a hobby motor directly to the shaft of one of the front wheels (made out of plywood, to be covered later with gum paste tires), so it would basically be a one-wheel drive car. This failed for at least two reasons. First, because the two front wheels weren’t connected to each other via a complete axle, both had a tendency to bind up in their bushings, so that moving even the light aluminum base without any cake on it took all the motor’s power. Second, because only one wheel was driving the truck, it had a tendency to try to pull the truck off course so that the L-bracket bound up in the track.

So I scrapped that and tried something else. This time, I connected the two front wheels with a brass and threaded rod axle. My plan was to transfer the power from the motor to the axle with a heavy-duty rubber band under tension. This plan failed even before I connected it to the wheels, as the minute that I started experimenting with putting tension on a rubber band around the shaft of any of the hobby motors I had in hand it became clear that none of my motors had nearly enough torque to get the job done.

I went online and located a promising-looking high-torque motor. While I was waiting for that to arrive, I started playing around with the possibility of a motor-less drive mechanism. My first thought was a tension spring. Unfortunately, a few major problems with this idea soon became clear. First, the length difference between the relaxed spring and the spring under tension wasn’t nearly enough. I couldn’t pull the truck all the way back to the end of the track, and even with the spring fully relaxed I was afraid that the truck wouldn’t even reach the “cake” to smash it. Second, I was very scared that, if I had to keep Big Rig under that kind of tension for any length of time there was a significant risk of premature smashing, which would be a real tragedy. Third, I really wanted Big Rig’s tires to spin on their own, so I could start the wheels spinning, and then release the truck for the final smash. There’s a great illustration in Zoom! Boom! Bully where Big Rig’s tires are spinning into a whirl of smoke just as Jack shouts, “Stop!” and the other trucks reveal that the “cake” is for Big Rig’s birthday. I really wanted to recreate this moment in cake before the smash, and that required motor power directly to Big Rig’s wheels.

I managed to solve the first of these problems by substituting a jumbo-sized rubber band for the spring. The rubber band had a much higher stretch-to-length ratio than the spring, and the flexibility of the rubber band meant that even after its tension was exhausted, it at least wouldn’t arrest the momentum of the truck. The rubber band also seemed to have sufficient power to move the truck fairly quickly, even with the projected added weight of the cake and gum paste. But the rubber band still left my other two concerns unaddressed. It still required the truck to be under tension for a longer period of time than I was comfortable with, unless I could come up with a release mechanism that I could set after the cake was completed and moved into place. And in order to achieve the effect I wanted with the tires spinning prior to release, I really needed tires that were legitimately motor-powered.

Fortunately, when my high-torque motor arrived, early signs were encouraging. Unlike the motors I was trying before, it was clearly powerful enough to withstand the tension on the rubber band. So I mounted the motor to the cake base and ran the rubber band to connect the motor shaft to the axle. Initially, I was delighted with the result. With no weight on the aluminum base, the truck drove great. However, as soon as I put some weight on it, to mimic the weight of the cake and gum paste I was planning to put onto Big Rig, it stopped working altogether, as the added weight was sufficient to counteract the tension on the rubber band and cause it just to slip uselessly around the axle. I tried to mitigate this problem by putting something sticky on the axle, but this just made the rubber band stick to itself and get wound up around the axle.

Next, I tried using gears to transfer the power from the motor to the axle, which required a complete redo of the front bushings to leave space between the axle and the aluminum base for the gear. Like the rubber band drive, this worked great until I put any weight on the base. Unlike with the rubber band, the truck did at least move with additional weight on it. It just moved very slowly. I did have hopes, though, that if I kept the cake as light as I possibly could, it might work.

To give it an extra boost of power, I decided to combine this partially successful motor solution with my partially successful rubber band solution. I designed a release mechanism consisting of a piece of U-shaped channel that ran across the track, underneath the base, attached to a dowel handle leading out the side of the base. That way, with the rubber band connected to one of the L-brackets under the truck base on one end and an eye bolt at the “cake” end of the track at the other end, I could finish decorating Big Rig with the rubber band relaxed, and then pull him back and set the L-bracket into the U-channel. This would hold him in place, and hold the front wheels a fraction of an inch off the base, so I could turn the motor on, let the wheels spin freely for a second, and then pull the dowel to release him. The rubber band would pull Big Rig forward while the wheel simultaneously pushed him forward. I could only hope that would provide enough force to make him powerfully smash into the “cake.”

And thus ends the saga of making Big Rig go, but I still had to actually make Big Rig. Because Big Rig has a kind of maniacally glowing face, as well as taillights and a menacing glow inside his wheel wells, he needed a lot of LEDs. Fortunately, by this point I’ve done so many LED-intensive cakes that I could basically just chop and splice segments together as needed, so the wiring went pretty quickly.

All the gum paste pieces, including tires, hubcaps, fuel tanks, bumpers, walls, trim, and yellow party hat, were made and dried in advance. To get the requisite orange and yellow glow out of Big Rig’s eyes, mouth, etc. I made sheets of gelatin with fades from yellow to orange, backed with rice paper to diffuse the light form the LEDs.

The cake itself was limited to the back of Big Rig and a very small square of cake inside his cab. At the party, someone pointed out that it was like a little cake engine block. I couldn’t put a bigger cake inside his head, because I needed to leave space around it for the LEDs. I kept the fondant layer on the cakes (necessary to prevent the gum paste from touching the buttercream icing, which softens dried gum paste) as thin as possible to keep the weight down. Fortunately, since I was covering the entire thing with pre-made gum paste pieces, the fondant didn’t have to look particularly nice.

With the cakes in place, attaching the gum paste exterior and all the trim pieces was really quite simple. The only problem I had was that when I redid the front axle bushings to accommodate the gears, I had failed to make the corresponding changes to the templates for Big Rig’s cab, so the sides, front, and back of the cab were all about half an inch too short. Fortunately, I had some extra dry blue gum paste pieces that I was able to cut down to patch the gaps. With some liberal royal icing spackle, it turned out just fine. The finishing touches were the royal icing antennae on the top. I have no idea why Big Rig needs so many antennae (which is what I told Alex when she asked me that question) but he has them in the book, so he had them in the cake.

“Cake”

Although the “cake” was the easiest component in that it didn’t have to do anything but sit there and be smashed, it also required more individual gum paste pieces than (I think) Melvin and Big Rig put together. Each barrel was made of five separate gum paste pieces and each crate required six. At the early planning stages of this project, I had envisioned putting tiny individual pieces of cake inside each crate and each barrel. Considering that the crates were only an inch and a half on each side, and the barrels were even smaller, I’m very glad that I came to my senses before I tried to do this. It’s not like there wasn’t already more cake than our guests would possibly eat anyway. Instead, I just put a little square of cake inside the “cake”, surrounded by the hollow crates and barrels and fondant tires. This probably made for a better smash in the long run anyway.

In addition to the crates and barrels, the cake also included a selection of fondant tires and gum paste pipes. Since I had made way more of all these things than were actually required, I used the extras to create bonus piles of stuff around the perimeter of the plywood cake base.

Finishing touches

With everything assembled, I actually went to bed at a relatively reasonable hour the night before the party. The next morning, as I was putting on the finishing touches – mostly adding a little dirt and grime with black powdered food coloring – Alex came in to inspect my work. She walked around it, studying it very carefully and commenting favorably on specific elements, like Big Rig’s tires and Melvin’s articulation. She then pointed out that I needed to put eyes on the chicken hood ornament on Melvin’s nose, which was already on my list of details to finish up before the party.

Alex then noted that I hadn’t made a hitch for the back of Big Rig. I had considered making a hitch for Big Rig, but decided against it because it doesn’t play any role in this scenario and because in some of the images in the source book, he doesn’t appear to have a hitch. Alex listened patiently to this explanation and then countered by pointing out that, in Truckery Rhymes, Big Rig is shown towing a trailer, which he couldn’t do if he didn’t have a hitch. I was forced to bow to her superior logic and quickly made a gum paste hitch. Actually, it even looked better from an aesthetic point of view, as the silver hitch made the solid blue rear section of Big Rig much more interesting. What I especially love about Alex’s argument is that it draws not just upon the specific source book for this project – Zoom Boom Bully – but upon the rest of the Trucktown canon as well. I also enjoy that it is a functional argument. Her point was not merely that Big Rig should have a hitch because he is shown with a hitch in the illustrations, but that Big Rig needs a hitch or he would be unable to fulfill his function as a big rig.

With the hitch completed, I got Alex’s dad to help me move the cake out to the dining room. Then came the stressful moment when I had to pull Big Rig back into his release mechanism. I was terrified that I was either going to lose my grip and send him crashing into the “cake” or crack Big Rig’s head to pieces in the effort of pulling back the rubber band. Fortunately I avoided either catastrophe and got Big Rig primed for release with only the loss of one fuel tank that was easily reattached.

Alex then consulted the source material for one final check on the accuracy of my work. She pointed out that, in the book, the “cake” is shown on a wooden palette, and I had failed to put my cake version of the “cake” onto a palette. I explained that I had noticed that and had considered putting the “cake” on a palette but had decided against it as I was afraid that the palette would arrest Big Rig’s movement so that he wouldn’t smash into the “cake” as effectively. Alex considered this carefully and then decided that perhaps Big Rig had taken the “cake” home on the palette and then removed it from the palette in order to smash it. I agreed that was an excellent explanation.

The party

With only one exception, the cake worked very well. Melvin’s drum turned flawlessly, but sadly, he did not actually pour cement. Either the drum and/or the wedges inside weren’t angle correctly or I had made the ganache too thick. Also, I didn’t really know which way the drum was supposed to be turning to make the cement come out. Cement mixers are complicated. Oh well, at least the drum turned.

Most importantly, Big Rig worked! Zoom! Boom! One of the barrels even flew off the table. Big Rig’s front bumper cracked beautifully so that he wound up with an excellent jagged evil grin.

Alex had a great time eating various gum paste bits (and a little bit of actual cake.) I particularly enjoyed it when she ate one of Melvin’s eyes, revealing the LEDs and leaving Melvin looking like a mangled cyborg.

The next day, as Alex was helping me to disassemble the remains of the cake and salvage the electronic components, she told Melvin (who was by this point essentially just a severed head) that he was her favorite cake ever. I call that a big success. Alex was a very tough audience with an incredible eye for detail. She was tremendously critical, but with such sincerity and such admiration. She has absolute confidence in my ability to execute a perfect cake version of Big Rig, so of course she wants to point out my errors so that I can correct them. It’s such a charming combination of exactitude and blind faith. She’s the perfect manager.

Jet Truck Cake

This cake was for my nephew, Sam’s, first birthday. It’s based on a real truck. When I asked Sam’s big sister Alex, who was, at the time, almost four years old, what kind of cake she thought that Sam would like for his birthday, she gave me very detailed specs:

• Tractor-trailer – w/o trailer

• Racing truck

• Racing trucks are yellow.

• Jet engines on the back

• Flame powered engine

• Flames come out of exhaust pipe

• Flame powered fuel

• Button to turn on flames

• Alex will show Sam how flames work

• Flames come out of jet engine

• Flame powered fuel tank on the side

When I showed my notes to my sister, Alex and Sam’s mom, she immediately knew what truck she was thinking of. Evidently she had seen it in a video on youtube. A few google searches later, I had some great reference photos to work from.

Since the planned birthday party would be attended by numerous small children, I decided that having actual flames shoot out the back of the cake would be a bad idea, even if I could accomplish it in a food-safe way. Instead, I planned to make basically a miniature version of the flames on those plastic Halloween cauldrons where a light and a fan inside the cauldron make some waving fabric look like relatively convincing flames.

Ultimately, it didn’t work out nearly as well as I had hoped, for several reasons:

1)    Initially I had hoped that I would be able to substitute something edible for the fabric “flames” but I was unable to come up with any food item that was thin, dry, lightweight, and flexible enough to fit the bill. The closest I came was the skin of a bell pepper, but that was too brittle when dried.

2)    I bought white fabric, but then dyed it red and orange with food coloring, which stiffened it a bit more than was optimal so it didn’t move as fluidly as I wanted.

3)    Fans small enough to fit inside a 2” diameter gum paste rocket aren’t all that powerful. I bought a couple of different ones to try out. I thought the ones I decided on would work, but once I got them all the way hooked up with the fabric I found that they didn’t have enough punch to move strips of fabric more than a couple inches long.

4)    When I stuck the fabric to the gum paste rockets, I did it in such a way that the air only passed over one side of the fabric, not both. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize what a big error this was until it was too late to do anything to fix it.

5)    When I installed the fans and rockets on the cake, I didn’t leave enough room at the back of the rocket for air to get sucked into the fan. Again, I realized the error too late to correct.

So the flame effect wound up being mediocre at best, but otherwise I think I captured the essence of the jet truck pretty well.

For the base, I started with a trapezoid of plywood. I guess I though that a trapezoid would give it more of a sense of motion than a rectangle, but I’m not sure it really did much. I used grey run-in royal icing, with white and black food coloring sponged on to make it look like asphalt. On top of that I painted yellow lane markers with thinned royal icing and then yellow food coloring.

To raise the body of the truck up off the ground, I mounted a second, thinner piece of plywood, on top of some sections of 1” aluminum channel, positioned so that that channel would later be hidden behind the tires. I covered this piece of plywood with black fondant.

At this point I did all the wiring for the fans and the LEDs to light up the inside of the rockets. I got some nice big red buttons to turn them on and off because I thought that Alex would enjoy that.

Next, I used gum paste, detailed with royal icing, to make the rockets, the grill, the spoiler, the hubcaps, the wheel wells, the fuel tanks, the bumpers, the reflectors, the license plates, and so on and so on. I used fondant for the tires and a few of the other bulkier trim pieces.

Shiny chrome truck bits gave me a chance to try out my new metallic edible airbrush colors. I was a bit skeptical, but they worked great. I was especially pleased with the job I did on the rockets.

For the cake itself I started with three 10” square cakes, carved into the two separate pieces of the cab, then crumb-coated with buttercream. Once covered with fondant, the corners were more rounded than I wanted, giving the truck a more puffy, cartoon-ish look than I would have liked. I’m reaching the conclusion that the only way to get nice, sharp mechanical corners is to pre-make gum paste pieces like I did for the Tardis cake.

My plan was to cover the front cab section first with blue fondant then with yellow fondant so that I could cut the yellow fondant away from the windows revealing the blue fondant beneath. (This is after I decided that my original plan to actually create an interior for the truck that could be seen through the windows was not feasible in the time I had available.) I have never personally tried this technique before, but I have seen them do it many times on Ace of Cakes, so I figured I ought to be able to do it easily. It probably would have worked just fine, except that I decided to wait to cut out the windows until after I airbrushed the orange and red stripes onto the cake.

Masking parts of the cake off and airbrushing is another technique I’ve seen on Ace of Cakes, but this was my first try at it. It worked relatively well, but next time I’ll be more careful with my masking, since I did have a few spots where the color bled under the paper.

By the time I was finished airbrushing, the top yellow layer of fondant had completely fused to bottom blue layer of fondant, so it was utterly impossible to remove one without removing the other. So I cut all the way through both layers for the windshield, the side windows, and the front grille, all the way down to the crumb-coat, and then stuck a new piece of blue fondant into the hole. To give it a window-like gloss, I painted a layer of piping gel onto the windows.

Assembling the rockets around the fans and the lights was a bit of a challenge, both because I kept getting confused about which side of what rocket each wire was supposed to go on and because I had underestimated the required length of a few wires and had to splice in some extra pieces.

Then it was just a matter of attaching tires, fuel tanks, trim, etc. and running a strip of ribbon around the edge of the base to hide the side of the plywood. I stuck the candle into one of the exhaust pipes.

I’m happy to say that Alex was delighted with the cake, even though the flames were a little lame.

I tried putting edible glittering into the rockets so that it was blown out when the fans were turned on, but that wasn’t too dramatic either. Mostly I think Alex just liked pushing the buttons.

Sam was pretty impressed with the cake, too, although he didn’t actually get any of it, because I foolishly used a chocolate cake recipe that involved almond extract and my sister didn’t want to give him nuts yet for fear of allergies, so we made a last minute emergency batch of cupcakes with a nut-free recipe. Sam was very much in favor of the cupcake. I think the only food I’ve ever seen him enjoy more was pumpkin pie. Alex, on the other hand, was most entranced with eating the gum paste pieces. At one point in the party she ran past me, doing a little happy dance, singing, “I have an exhaust pipe!”

TARDIS Cake

It's a TARDIS! It's bigger on the inside! It's two feet tall (quarter scale)! And aside from the lights, everything you see is edible.

I love Dr. Who. Just a few weeks ago my sister-in-law and I waited in line for five hours to get good seats at the Dr. Who panel at Comic-Con. Totally worth it!

Since I would have to be a Time Lord to make a Tardis cake that could actually go anywhere in time and space, I decided to do the next best thing - make a Tardis cake that's bigger on the inside. Or at least appears to be. Like I said, I'm not a Time Lord. I chose to go with the new Tardis interior because, as it is both more organic and more interestingly illuminated than any previous Tardis interior, I thought it would be the most visually effective.

First I had to figure out the best way to create the illusion of a more spacious interior. I tried to consult the internet about optical illusions, but didn't find anything helpful, so I went with old fashioned trial and error. I played around with a lot of different configurations, eventually settling on two convex mirrors arranged at about a 45 degree angle. To get the curve I wanted, I used flexible carnival mirror, glued onto my custom made wood and mat board form.

Next, in order to illuminate the inside of the Tardis and the "Police Box" signs on the outside, I needed to learn at least a little bit about electronics. So I ordered a DIY Electronics Kit from the MakerShed that was really sort of geared for pre-teens, but it was also very helpful. Armed with new-found knowledge of resistors and LEDs, I trolled the internet for the best deals and ordered a total of 385 LEDs in blue, aqua, green, yellow, white, and flashing white. They didn't all make it into the cake, but I did wind up using enough of them that I used seven nine-volt batteries to power them. I embedded these batteries into a plywood base and mounted the mirrors.

With my structure in place, it was time to start making gum paste pieces. The exterior required fifty-two separate pieces of gum paste - two for the panels on each of the four sides plus one inward-facing panel for the side that looked into the interior and three to back the windows on the other three sides, six for each of the four "Police Box" signs (some of which were quite tedious, as I had to painstakingly cut out the words to let the light through), and sixteen for the roof. Later I needed an additional seventy-two pieces of gum paste for the window frames and mullions. I went with a grey-blue marbled effect because I thought it would look more convincing and more interesting than a uniform color field.

To make the interior I started with a gum paste floor with cutouts to let the light through from all the white LEDs embedded in the base. In order to enhance the illusion of interior space and elevate the bottom of the central console sufficiently to make it easily visible through the windows, I gave the floor a serpentine curve, supported by gum paste struts. Then I stuck a layer of rice paper to the top of the gum paste floor and painted it dark grey with food coloring. On top of this I piped grey royal icing expanded steel. It went pretty quickly, because I got a lot of practice making royal icing expanded steel when I was making the Demolition Cake. To give it a nice sheen, I went over it with some silver luster dust.

Now it was time to make the control console. Fortunately, thanks to the mirrors, I only needed to make one eighth of it. The console structure is gum paste and sheet gelatin, assembled around blue, green, and aqua LEDs and attached to the mirrors with clear piping gel. Then I had a good time sticking on a myriad of gum paste and royal icing levers, dials, cables, monitors, etc. At times the mirrors made things a little difficult because it was sometimes hard to remember which was the real console and which was the reflection. Liberal use of silver, bronze, and gold luster dust made everything nice and shiny.

With the interior finished, I assembled the exterior gum paste pieces, adding the royal icing molding around the perimeter of each recessed panel, and installing the window mullions and backing.

It was at this point in the process that we decided that we really should schedule a party so that we would have something to do with this cake when it was finished. Fortunately, we have a lot of nerd friends, so we soon had about forty positive rsvps to our evite. It was also at this point in the process that I took some time off to go to Comic-Con and then on a family trip to Colorado, so my gum paste pieces had a long time to thoroughly dry. This was definitely an advantage, because it would have been very hard to assemble the cake with anything less than 100% dry gum paste and because the pieces were so large that they did require some significant drying time.

A week before the party I began assembling the exterior, beginning by putting together the "Police Box" signs around my strings of white LEDs. I backed the cutout letters with rice paper, both to diffuse the light and so that I could stick the free-floating interior pieces of the O's, P's, A's, and B's to the rice paper.

Because of the mirrors and the interior space only a little less than half of the interior was actually going to be made of cake. This meant that I could install two of the four sides prior to baking any cake and even attach and solder their respective "Police Box" signs.

Three days before the party I baked the cake. We decided to go with a banana cake with chocolate buttercream icing because, to quote the Doctor, "You should always bring a banana to a party. Bananas are good." I needed a total of eight two inch tall, ten inch square cakes. Of the eight cakes, seven of them were cut in half on the diagonal and stacked in the body of the Tardis. The last cake was reserved for the square top section.

With the cakes in place, I covered them with a layer of fondant, to prevent the gum paste exterior pieces from coming into contact with the buttercream, which would moisten, soften, and weaken the gum paste. Then I was able to install the last two side pieces and their respective "Police Box" signs.

I put the top section together separately, carving the slanted roof, covering it with fondant, and then assembling the gum paste pieces around it with royal icing. I left a hole through the middle, so that I could run blinking LEDs through it for the light on top. Once the top section was in place, my Tardis really started to look like a complete piece, but it still needed a lot a detail work.

I used fondant rather than gum paste to cover the base and for the trim on the corners and in the center of each side panel because some of them needed to be relatively thick, which is easier to accomplish with fondant. I did use gum paste, however, for the thin strips of molding around the perimeter of each "Police Box" sign.

To make the little light on top, I wrapped rice paper around gum paste circles, then put panels of sheet gelatin on top of that, followed by gum paste trim and royal icing mullions. The curved top is gum paste dried over Styrofoam balls.

With all the major features in place, I went over the entire structure with royal icing smoothed with a damp paintbrush, to hide unwanted seams and fill in a few gaps. Then, to give it that distressed look of a vehicle that's been to the end of the universe and back again, I went into all the corners with some black powdered food coloring on a soft paintbrush.

To make the sign for the front of the Tardis, I blew up an image of it to the correct size and then essentially made some edible transfer paper by coating the back with black powdered food coloring. I put this on top of a dry white piece of gum paste and traced all the letters with a stylus to transfer the text onto the gum paste below. Then I painted over the letters with black paste color.

The finishing touches were the royal icing handles, hinges, and tacks to hold on the sign, and the gum paste lock.

Carrying the cake to the table for the party was a bit stressful and difficult, as it probably weighed fifty pounds and all of the weight was in one half of the cake. Part of me was convinced that, after literally months of planning and building, I was going to drop it at the penultimate moment. But actually the move went perfectly smoothly. I got my brother-in-law to help me and he even bravely volunteered to carry the heavy end.

I'm really pleased with the way this one came out, maybe more so than any cake I've ever made before. Please note that, with the exception of the mirrors, the electronics, and the wooden base and dowels and foam core separators that would needed in any cake this size, it is entirely edible. (And if anyone knows how to make an edible mirror, please let me know.) It's hard to capture the "bigger-on-the-inside" effect in a photo, but I do think it was pretty darned successful. By an odd coincidence, Cake Wrecks (one of my favorite websites) did a Dr. Who post on the very same day that we had our party, so I immediately sent them photos of the cake, mere hours after it had been consumed, and they very kindly posted it right away!

For hours after we attended the Dr. Who panel at Comic-Con, my sister-in-law and I were all a-twitter about how awesome it was; now I still kind of feel that way about this cake.

Dinosaur Graveyard Cake

Pastry arts for a good cause - this cake was raffled off at a fundraiser for my niece's preschool.

Watch the train on YouTube

...and more

...and more

My niece's pre-school was having a fundraiser. My challenge - make a cake for the raffle that fulfilled all of the following conditions: The cake should be:

1. Small enough that people wouldn't be intimidated by the prospect of eating it.

2. Sturdy enough that there would be minimal possibility of breakage when the winner transported it home.

3. Enough like a normal cake in appearance that people would recognize it as such when walking by the raffle table.

4. Appealing enough to the average two-to-four-year-old that he or she could be counted upon to pester his or her parents into purchasing raffle tickets for it.

5. Appealing enough to the average parent of a two-to-four-year-old that he or she would be willing, with some childish prompting, to spend a few bucks for a raffle ticket for a good cause.

6. Appealing enough to me that I wouldn't get bored making it.

Collectively, these represent waaaay more constraints than I have ever had placed on one of my cakes before. Prior to this, my biggest restriction was when my sister and I made a cake for our friends' wedding and they said that, ideally, it probably shouldn't bleed, explode, or catch fire.

So I had a bit of a challenge developing an initial concept, but ultimately I came up with a solution that I think fulfilled all the requirements. Viewed from one angle it would appear to be an ordinary 12" round cake, covered with white fondant, delicately decorated with cornelli lace, so as to appeal to people who like their cake to look like cake. From the other side, however, the fondant would be cut away to reveal a subterranean tunnel with a train going around and around, so as to appeal to the toddler set. The train would be pursued by a ravenous dinosaur, so as to appeal to me.

I think I can best explain the process of construction by breaking it up into its component elements.

The train:

The first thing I needed was a way to make the train go. I figured the easiest thing to do would be to get some kind of battery operated car toy and build my train around it, so I went to Toys R Us. Mind you, I detest Toys R Us, for various reasons that I needn't go into here, but I was in a hurry and it was my best option for a quick solution. The toy I selected was a battery operated Thomas the Tank Engine, which turned out to be delightfully easy to decapitate, leaving me essentially with a AA battery on wheels.

In keeping with the subterranean / archeological theme of the cake, I found a photo of an old-timey mining cart to work from. First I encased the body of the train in a box made of flat gum paste pieces, with semicircles cut out to accommodate the wheels, then I added additional gum paste wooden slats. I used one of the semicircular cut off pieces from the wheels to cover the little magnetic hookup that toy train cars have on the back. I also made a cow catcher for the front. Because of all those cows that archaeologists encounter in underground caves.

I wanted to cover the wheels (which were bright green) with gum paste to make them more rustic and less plastic looking, but every time I tried, the wheels came out too big for the track (more on that later) so I wound up just painting the green wheels with black food coloring.

To get some human interest into my tableau, I wanted to put a little gum paste archaeologist in the train car. After all, no self-respecting dinosaur would be chasing an empty train car - a T-Rex in particular would need the prospect of juicy meat to get him moving. I tried to make my archaeologist look really terrified, with a gaping mouth and wide, staring eyes, looking over his shoulder at his dreadful pursuer. I also couldn't resist making him a little Indiana-Jones-style hat and a pickaxe. The train had a big button on top to start and stop it. At first, my plan was to put my little man directly on top of that button so that you had to push on his head to make the train go, but then I realized that was just too risky to be worth it - who wants to see a man with a smooshed head being chased by a dinosaur? So I moved him to right in front of the button and left the button alone. I'm glad I did because by the time I was done some crumbs or something must have fallen into the mechanism because the button got a bit temperamental.

I then put a coat of paint on everything, using paste food colors thinned with vodka. It has recently been pointed out to me that using vodka to paint things intended for children might not be 100% ok, which had never occurred to me. I choose to assume that the majority of the alcohol evaporates away and that what's left is so minimal as to make no difference. Certainly my niece has shown no ill effects from the last three birthday cakes that I've made for her.

With my base coat in place, I was ready to add fine details. I made some royal icing chains and rivets. I also added some royal icing dinosaur bones around my archaeologist, and threw in some oreo cookie crumb dirt for good measure. I used some more vodka (Woo hoo! Par-ty!) with bronze luster dust to make the chains look metallic.

The track:

Now I had an operational train, but a train doesn't do anyone any good unless it goes where you want it to go. So I needed a track. It took me five or six cardboard mockups before I got one where the tracks were the right width and the right distance apart and correctly positioned within the circle of the cake. Once I had a functional mockup that worked with my little toy train, I covered a foamcore circle with a 1/4" thick layer of white fondant and used my mockup as a template to carve the fondant away to create the two concentric circles of the track. With the fondant cut away, I needed to do something to cover the foam core revealed underneath. After a few experiments, I settled on painting the revealed foam core base red (which frankly would have been a lot easier to do had it occurred to me to paint it red before I covered it with fondant). Because I didn't do the world's best job of this, I dusted the track with a lot of brown and black powdered food coloring and silver luster dust to try to conceal my mistakes.

The dinosaur:

A little train by itself might be interesting enough for pre-schoolers, but I have loftier aspirations. To keep my interest, the cake needed a monster. And it had to be Big! Fierce! Mean! Prehistoric! RAAAWR! I settled on T-Rex.

Step 1 - find internet photos. Of course, the internet crazies have conflicting opinions on what T-Rex looked like, so I just picked the skin texture and color scheme that seemed the most appealing to me.

I made two gum paste bodies, because I wasn't sure quite what size I wanted. I wound up using the bigger one. By letting the gum paste dry for a few minutes, so that it developed a bit of a dry shell, and then bending the body a little I was able to create a delightful wrinkly skin texture.

In order for the dinosaur to chase the train, it of course needed to be on wheels. My first idea was to use the wheels from a tiny little toy skateboard. This didn't work at all. For one thing, toy skateboard wheels turn out to be very flimsy and not very well aligned. I know this is a shock, considering that I bought it for $3.95 at Target. For another thing, toy skateboard wheels are extremely small, on the order of 1/8" in diameter. Since my layer of fondant between the two track circles was on the order of 1/4" thick, I clearly had a problem. I tried to salvage my skateboard wheel solution by cutting larger plastic circles and gluing them to the existing skateboard wheels. Then I realized that this was a stupid idea and I should just make the wheels from scratch.

I cut two new sets of plastic wheels, larger for the front, smaller for the back and put hot glue rims on them so as to give them the requisite traction. For the axles I used brass tubing, encased in slightly larger diameter brass tubing to allow it to rotate freely. I attached these to the body of the dinosaur by using royal icing and by cramming brass tubing up into the body.

I tried to mask the wheels a little when I added the gum paste legs, but since I was simultaneously trying to position the legs as if T-Rex was in a full-out run, and since I was trying to conceal four wheels with two legs, I wasn't very successful. I chose a nice muted ochre and brown color scheme, with some purple and green details, again using vodka and paste food colors for paint. Once that dried, I used royal icing to make little teeth and claws. I of course couldn't resist adding a bit of food coloring blood to the tips.

The hookup:

I now had a train on wheels and a dinosaur on wheels but in order to make the dinosaur chase the train I needed to connect the dinosaur to the train. I cut and bent a piece of brass tubing into the correct curve. Gluing it to the dinosaur was easy. Gluing it to the train was exceedingly difficult. First I tried hot glue. Then I tried Superglue. Then I tried hobby cement. Then I tried epoxy. As it turns out, for some inexplicable reason, none of these things stick to the underbody of Thomas the Tank Engine, even after he's been roughed up with a flat file. Eventually I resorted to the king of household glues - Gorilla Glue. Because Gorilla Glue expands as it dries, I was terrified that it would push everything completely out of alignment, but it actually worked.

The tunnel:

With my train and dinosaur set, I needed a tunnel for them to run through. My original plan was to create a nice rocky texture by making a mold in the shape I wanted the tunnel to be, lining it with plastic produce bags (because they release easily from chocolate), filling it with crushed ice, and then pouring tempered chocolate over it. In my imagination, this technique created a beautiful organic texture. In reality, it created absolutely nothing of value because the chocolate set up before it got beyond the first layer of ice. I went to plan B.

Plan B involved making two concentric tubes of chocolate with holes in them to form the inner and outer walls of the tunnel. One would be 6" in diameter, to fit around the 6" round cake that would be in the middle of my creation. The other would be 12" in diameter, leaving a 3" tunnel for the train to pass through.

At first I envisioned creating these tubes by spreading chocolate over bubble wrap (which also releases easily from chocolate), cutting it into appropriate rectangles, and then wrapping the rectangles around cake tins of the appropriate diameter, all while the chocolate was set up enough to cut accurately but malleable enough to wrap around the cylinder. This didn't work either. By the time the chocolate set up enough to cut it was too firm to wrap, so it just cracked when I tried to bend it into the right curve. I was also having problems getting my chocolate in good temper, so it wasn't setting as firmly as I would have liked. Normally I would blame problems like this on my own relatively limited experience working with chocolate. In this case though I'm more inclined to blame the problem on the chocolate itself because, at the same time as I was making this cake, I was also making chocolates to raffle off at the event, and I was having spectacular success tempering chocolate bars that had been sitting in our cabinets for so long that they were essentially just big slabs of chalky blooms. For the cake, though, I was using a new bag of chocolate medallions from my local cake supply store and I couldn't get them in temper to save my life. So I choose to blame the chocolate.

My third plan was to wrap the 6" and 12" cake pans in tin foil and them pipe tempered chocolate onto them in an abstract pattern. Due to my issues with getting my chocolate in temper I was concerned with the stability of the structure and I thought that I might get it to be sturdier and set up faster by mixing in a little corn syrup. This is a technique that I used to good effect when I made the shrunken head truffles, but in this application it just seemed to make the chocolate more brittle. So the technique that I finally ended up with was putting the tin foil wrapped cake tins in the freezer and piping the (sort of) tempered chocolate onto the cold foil in an abstract pattern with lots of open space. This helped the chocolate to firm up quickly when it touched the cold foil so that it wouldn't drip down the sides of the cake pan.

Third time's a charm. This time my plan more or less worked, although I still wasn't happy with the temper of my chocolate and my finished pieces broke in a few places when I unmolded them from the tin foil. But I figured it was nothing I couldn't repair when I put it in place around the cake.

The cake:

The cake itself is actually the most boring part of this story. All I needed was a 6" round cake. I tried a new recipe for chocolate cake, but when I went to torte it I realized that it wasn't baked all the way through, so I had to make an emergency backup cake. Since I didn't have any more cocoa powder I went with a white cake, which turned out fine. I torted and filled that one with buttercream icing. My sister took the incompletely baked cake, carved a hole out of the center to remove the uncooked part, put some ice cream in the middle, and took it to a friend's birthday party so it wasn't a total loss.

The facade:

To make my 6" cake surrounded by chocolate cylinders look like a 12" cake with a chocolate tunnel inside, I premade two pieces of white fondant. One was a simple 12" circle to cover the top of the cake and tunnel. The other piece was to go part way around the perimeter of the cake, but it also had to appear to be cut away so as to reveal the tunnel inside. I rolled out a piece of fondant, then cut it into a sort of ragged trapezoid. I used a ball tool to thin out the rough edges then draped the whole piece over the side of a 12" cake pan to get the right curve. To make sure that these pieces were dry enough to maintain their rigidity I made them a week in advance.

Putting it all together:

With all my components pre-made it was a simple matter to place my 6" round cake in the center of my train track and piece together my chocolate tunnel around it. For some reason my 6" round chocolate cylinder was bigger than I needed it to be, but the fact that it was poorly tempered meant that it was easy to cut a slice off to adjust.

Chocolate tunnel in place, I stuck my fondant circle on top and my curved fondant piece around the edge with some royal icing. I was a bit concerned about the top fondant circle drooping, as a large section of it was unsupported. My concerns were not wholly unfounded, as close examination of the finished cake does uncover some definite unintended curvature to the top of the cake, but as it didn't seem to pose a risk of structural cake failure I didn't let myself get unduly concerned.

In order to integrate the dinosaur with the cake, I incorporated subtle dinosaur skeletons into the cornelli lace that I piped onto the fondant. I used a #2 tip because I was too lazy to use a #1 tip. I also put a couple of dinosaur skeletons onto the inner wall of the chocolate tunnel.

When we set the cake up at the fundraiser, we tried to position it such that children would be able to see it easily, but not grab the train. For the most part, we succeeded. Only at one point during the party did I have to shoo away a toddler who was trying to snatch the dinosaur. The cake was ultimately won in the raffle by one of the kids from my niece's preschool. I hope that he and his family enjoyed it.

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.

Circulating Heart Cake

Some variation on a bleeding heart cake is a relatively standard feature of our annual Pumpkinfest. This year, I was trying to make a cake through which "blood" (cranberry juice) would continuously and visibly circulate.

Concept: A cake, shaped like a heart and covered with fondant, sitting on top of a platform elevated above a reservoir full of cranberry juice. In the reservoir, a pump attached to a tube leading up the side of the cake to pump the cranberry juice up and over the cake. To contain the juice and insure that it spread nicely over the surface of the cake, an isomalt (sugar substitute) shell, also in the shape of a heart, placed over the cake, leaving about an eighth inch of space for the juice to flow between the cake and the outer shell. In the opposite side of the elevated platform from the tube, a series of holes to drain the juice back into the reservoir and begin the whole cycle all over again.

Step 1: Make an isomalt shell shaped like a heart. At first, I had hoped to find something that was already in the shape of a heart, cover it with tin foil, and pour isomalt over the top. I wanted to use isomalt rather than sugar because it's more transparent. Unfortunately, in spite of having access to numerous seasonal Halloween stores, I was unable to locate anything that was a) accurately heart-shaped, b) big enough that I would be able to get sufficient cake for our guests inside, and c) able to resist the heat of liquid isomalt. I therefore had to make my tin foil heart mold from scratch. I started with a cereal bowl, upside down, and built up the rest of the heart shape around the bowl with wadded up tin foil. To get as smooth a surface as possible to pour over, once I had a shape I was happy with, I spread one final layer of tin foil on top and smoothed it as much as I possibly could. As you may recall from my description of the jellyfish cake, the problem that I often have with pouring sugar or isomalt over tin foil is that the little ridges of the tin foil get stuck in the solidified sugar and are very tedious and nerve-wracking to remove with tweezers and a damp paintbrush.

I put this tin foil heart onto a silpat mat and melted down my isomalt. In my earlier discussion of the jellyfish cake I described some of the problems that I have with making sugar domes. All of these problems apply equally to making isomalt hearts. I was also a little disappointed that the isomalt hardened somewhat cloudy, I think because I was working air into it as I pulled it back up the sides of my tin foil heart to prevent it from all pooling at the bottom. I was hoping for a transparent heart, but I had to settle for cloudy. I also think that there's something wrong with the bucket of isomalt that I have, because it always come out sort of yellow, when isomalt is supposed to be perfectly clear. At least the heart released from the tin foil better than any of my prior tin foil sugar projects.

Step 2: Make an elevated platform, pump, and reservoir assembly. Rather than purchasing any new equipment for this project, with just a little glue and a few additional holes drilled, I was able to repurpose some of the acrylic circles and tubes from the Triple Animal Cake and the pump and tubing from the Fish Fountain Cake. I used a cake tin for the reservoir. Not the most aesthetically inspired choice, perhaps, but highly functional and readily available.

Step 3: Make a heart-shaped cake. Internal-organ-shaped cakes being something of a specialty of mine, the carving went pretty quickly. I covered it with white fondant - a much thicker layer than usual, as I wanted it to be able to stand up to the juice running over it without dissolving away and exposing the cake - then sculpted in some of the major features, like the divisions between the chambers. Then I moved it onto the acrylic platform, and positioned the tube tight up against it. To get some additional detail (though I wasn't overly concerned with extreme detail, since the whole thing was going to be under my isomalt shell) I piped on royal icing and shaped it with a slightly damp, soft paintbrush. I also covered the tube with royal icing, both to hold it in place and to camouflage it. I painted the cake with brighter colors than I might have ordinarily, because I wanted them to read through the translucent shell.

Step 4: Attach the isomalt shell. Unfortunately, once I plopped the shell over top of the cake, it looked more like an amoeba than a heart. I hadn't planned to decorate the top surface of the shell, because I wanted it to be as see-through as possible, but I felt that I had to do something to make it more identifiable. So I went over the top surface of the isomalt with royal icing details and texture, and then painted the surface with some reds and blues. This did make it look marginally more like a heart, but it also made it much more opaque, which proved to be unfortunate when I got around to plugging the pump in.

Step 5: Fill the reservoir with cranberry juice, cross your fingers, and plug in the pump. Because my isomalt was cloudy from the get-go and because I had further opaqued the surface with royal icing and food coloring, the pumping action, while technically successful was exceedingly subtle. I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't explained it to everyone, no one would have had any idea what the cake was or what it was doing. I tried to capture it on video, but all you can really see is the juice venting down the side and back into the reservoir. (Which, by the way, I really should have directed out the aorta.) The video is further compromised by the fact that my camera was in the process of kicking the bucket resulting in a distinct horizontal line across the frame and the fact that there was a toddler screaming in the background.

Conclusion: I still believe that there is potential in the concept of a cake with fluids circulating inside, but I think it requires either a) a different form factor, b) a more competent isomalt handler, or c) both.

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.

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.

Enterprise Cupcakes

The Enterprise cupcakes were made for the wedding reception of two friends who are (obviously) big fans of the show. As am I. I decided to go with the original Enterprise both in honor of the significance of the institution of marriage - you don't want to commemorate such a monumental event with some Johnny-come-lately 1701-D - and because it's simpler to sculpt.

I don't recall exactly how many of these I made, but it was a lot. I decided that the most efficient way would be to make molds. I started by sculpting clay versions of the top half of the saucer section and one of the nacelles. I made molds of these with Model Magic. I know, it's not technically food safe, but it is non-toxic. I figured that if it won't make toddlers sick if they eat it, it wouldn't be detrimental to fondant through some brief physical contact.

Once the Model Magic molds dried it was a simple matter to press some fondant into the mold and pull it right back out, now shaped like a piece of the Starship Enterprise. I could have gotten more detail with a more rigid mold, but for the most part it worked well.

I used gum paste to create the thin quadrilaterals that connect the nacelles to the body of the starship. Once all the pieces were dry, I painted everything with silver luster dust mixed with vodka, then I used blue, orange, and pink luster dust to indicate the various lights and windows and such. Fortunately my sister helped me with a lot of this, since it was quite time consuming and I was working under the gun. The last touch was to paint on the name and number of the vessel. I went with the USS Dalton, in honor of the couple, and NCC 06 17 08, in commemoration of the wedding date.

My sister was kind enough to bake all the cupcakes that were to become the little starships, and run to Michael's to purchase a bunch of little white boxes and some tissue paper to put inside. After that, all that was left to do was assemble the disparate pieces into little starships.

I assembled each starship in place, in the box. After frosting the top of the cupcakes with buttercream, it was easy to plop the saucer section down on top. It was a bit trickier to assemble the nacelles. I used royal icing to stick the gum paste pieces to the bottoms of the nacelles, then more royal icing to stick the gum paste pieces to the bottom of the box next to the cupcake. I used a wadded up piece of tissue paper to simultaneously fill the empty space in the box, conceal the big blob of royal icing supporting the nacelles, and prop up the nacelles until said royal icing dried.

For the tops of the boxes my sister made some little royal icing Federation logos and labels with the wedding date, and, of course, that staple sentiment of all sappy Star Trek events, "Live long and prosper."

True to form, we wound up with way more cupcakes than there were guests at the reception, but otherwise they were a great success.

I was also able to use the same clay positives that I had made for the cupcakes to make a rubber mold for a two-part plastic cast of the starship, which I sprayed silver and presented to the couple as a keepsake. The nice thing about the plastic was that it picked up the detail that I was unable to capture in fondant.

Centipede Cake

When I was in MBA school I had to take a class called Venture Creation, for which the final project was to write a business plan. Mine was for a cake business. We also had to do a presentation for people pretending to be potential investors, so, as part of that presentation, I naturally needed to make a cake. The Centipede Cake is what I came up with.

Since the name of my imaginary cake business was Kinetic Cakes, it was obvious that my cake had to do something. Since I didn't have all that much time blocked out in my schedule to make the cake, it was obvious that it wouldn't do anything too complicated. Since there would only be a few people at the presentation, it was obvious that it shouldn't be very big. Since moderation in cakes is not one of my strong suits, it was obvious that I was going to make way too much cake.

I had some trouble coming up with a concept because I had a bit too much creative freedom - it can be hard to design anything when there are so few parameters. I have no idea why I ultimately settled on the centipede, unless perhaps it was because the apartment I was living in at the time was occasionally invaded by house centipedes, which are completely harmless but quite large and shocking to meet in the bathroom in the middle of the night. And I like arthropods. I once had to walk five blocks in my pajamas to my friend's apartment because she had a house centipede in her sink and couldn't get rid of it herself.

The legs are, of course, the most pivotal part of the centipede, plus it is their disturbingly inhuman rippling motion that makes the centipede seem so alien to us. It was this motion that I was trying to convey through my cake.

My plan was to mount the cake on a turntable that was, in turn, sitting on a bumpy base so that, when the turntable was spun, the legs, which would hang off the sides of the turntable, would ripple up and down as they passed over the bumps.

First I needed a turntable. I was fortunate enough to find one with a wire around the perimeter so that I could easily attach my legs to it. In order to do that, I built the legs around lengths of copper wire by piping royal icing onto each side of the wire with a large round tip. I airbrushed one side of each leg yellow and the other side orange because I though that having a variance in color between the two sides would help to emphasize the rotational motion of the turntable. To hide the seams running up each side of the legs, I piped on a thin line of turquoise royal icing. (If this sounds like an unusually colorful centipede, you're right. I don't really recall why I chose this color scheme, but it was quite festive.) Then I positioned the legs all the way around the perimeter of the turntable, wrapping the copper wire in the legs around the wire at the circumference of the turntable.

For the base that the turntable would rest on I used a big piece of foamcore, with smaller segments of foamcore arranged around it to create the bumps. Then I covered the whole thing with a layer of green marbled fondant, to suggest grass and because I like marbled fondant.

To make the cake, I started with two tiers of chocolate cake, one 10" in diameter, the other 8" in diameter, torted and filled with buttercream frosting. Then I carved that into a spiral, as if the centipede was curled into a loop, and coated it with buttercream.

Because centipedes have segmented bodies, it was easy to cover the cake with small fondant sections, each overlapping the one before. With the fondant in place, I built up the airbrush color in layers. First a yellow base, then orange and red shadows around the perimeter of each segment, then blue shading in the center of the segments. Once the color was on, I moved the whole cake onto the base, which already had the legs attached. I stuck some additional legs directly into the cake, following the curve of the centipede's body. In an attempt to conceal the edge of the turntable that wasn't already obscured by the legs, I piped on some sort of mini-legs between the big legs. I also piped some details onto the face. I had made some royal icing antennae and mandibles in advance, as well as some wicked-looking pincers for the back, and I stuck those on at this point as well. Then I airbrushed my new royal icing details with the same yellow, orange, red, and blue and a bit of black for good measure.

The cake went over well at the presentation, though I think if I were talking to real potential investors for a real project it would behoove me to make a cake that did something more impressive, though the rippling of the legs was nice in a restrained kind of way. And of course I had about five times as much cake as I needed, so I gave the rest to my friends in the Entrepreneurship Center. And I got an A in the class (which no one but my parents cares about because it's grad school.)

Fish Fountain Cake

The second in my series of disintegrating cake (the first being the Melting Head Cake), the Fish Fountain was made for the Second Annual MBA Art Show at my business school.

My goals in creating the Fish Fountain were:

1. To explore the impermanence of human achievement by creating a cake - a work of art that by its very nature must be destroyed to be appreciated - that preemptively destroys itself.

2. To show off for my classmates.

I think the main mistake that I made in designing this cake was that I was much more concerned with the functionality - the simple fact that it was a self-devouring fountain - than I was with the aesthetics, which, to be honest, were a bit of an afterthought and I was sort of making things up as I went along. I wish that I had put more thought into integrating the appearance of the cake with its actions. I also think that I could have made the melting more impactful had I made the exterior of the cake darker, because then when the color melted away to reveal the white fondant beneath it would have created a sharper contrast.

Instead, a fish was the first shape I thought of when I thought of a fountain, so I made a fish. Well, not just a fish, of course. In keeping with my usual style, I wanted to make it a bit monstrous and grotesque, so I decided to give it fins that were morphing into human hands and feet.

The first thing I did was make the hands and feet out of royal icing so they would have lots of time to dry. I piped the royal icing onto parchment paper, then set them over some curved cardboard pieces to give them a nice shape. In hopes that it would help the cake melt in an interesting fashion, I gave the fins some very thin sections and some very thick sections so they would dissolve at different rates.

Next I ran some tests on various form factors of sugar, to see how quickly they melted when left under a stream of water. I wanted the cake to melt quickly enough to be easily observable, but not so quickly that the cake would melt into a soggy inedible mess before everyone had a chance to appreciate the complexities of my concept. I experimented with pressed sugar, royal icing, isomalt sheets, hard candy sheets, and fondant. I also wanted to use multiple materials that would melt at different rates and create interesting textures. Everything worked pretty well, except for the pressed sugar, which dissolved too quickly to really be of any use to me.

Now I needed a fountain. I picked up two different little pumps at Home Depot as well as some tubing. After a fair amount of trial and error, I wound up with a plastic cake plate sitting in an ugly blue plastic bowl with a paper towel tube sticking up through the middle. Underneath the cake plate was my little pump, with a tube running up through the center of the paper towel tube. I wanted to make the water come out as close to vertically as possible, so that it would dissolve the cake all the way around and not just on one side. I knew I wouldn't be able to test it anymore once I had the cake in place, so I just had to set it up as best I could initially and hope.

For the cake, I made my usual chocolate recipe, baked a whole mess of rounds, torted and filled them with chocolate ganache, and stacked them around the paper towel tube. Because it was so tall, I used dowels and foamcore circles every four inches or so. Then I carved it into basically a big oblong blob and crumb coated it with more chocolate ganache. In retrospect I should have given it a more contrapposto shape. It would have been more dynamic.

Rather than try to cover such a tall shape with just one piece of fondant, I used three. I also made them extra thick because I didn't to risk the cake itself getting soggy. First I covered the side with two rectangles, so that the seam would run right up the back and the belly of the fish. Then I put one more piece over the top that would serve as the fish head up to the gills. This had the highly unfortunate effect of making it look like a penis.

Next I added the larger fondant decorations to the face. Again, my propensity for making monsters came to the fore and the fish came out very dragon-y. I also ran textured fondant lines up the front and back to hide the seams in my initial fondant layer. Then I put my royal icing fins and tail in place, using big skewers to hold them until the royal icing dried.

At this point, because I hadn't planned the visuals well enough, my decorations got a bit out of hand. It was like the royal icing had a mind of its own. I piped fringe, dots, whiskers, stripes ... in an attempt to conceal the fact that I had made the fountain inside a cheap plastic bowl from Walmart, I covered the bowl with royal icing as well and tried to texture it like stone with a sponge. It wasn't the prettiest thing in the world, but it was probably marginally less ugly than the bowl. I also sponged some royal icing onto the cake itself, as I was vaguely planning to give that a bit of a stone appearance as well.

Once my royal icing dried I put a base coat of airbrushing on. To emphasize the fact that my fish-dragon was also part human, I put flesh tone on the fins/hands and tail/feet. Because I was going for a stone feel overall, I put a grey base coat on the rest of the cake and on the bowl.

Now my fish needed scales. Of course, if I had really been committed to my stone texture idea, I would have sculpted the scales into the fondant before I applied my stone texture. But, as I said before, cohesive aesthetics was not my top priority. I thought by having several different media on the cake - royal icing, fondant, isomalt - I would get a more interesting melt. So I made some multicolored, iridescent scales by mixing isomalt powder with silver, purple, green, and blue luster dust, then melting little piles of the mixture in a 400 degree oven on a silpat mat. They came out nice and bubbly and organic-looking, but of course they did absolutely nothing to make the cake look like a stone fountain.

I stuck the scales to the cake using royal icing, gradating from green around the back ridge through blue and purple to the silver at the stomach ridge. Then these got out of control, too, and I started sticking scales on the face, the fingers, the toes, everywhere ... I just couldn't stop myself. Improv has never been a strong suit of mine - I really need a firm plan to work from, or I won't be happy with the results.

To try to better integrate the multitude of scales with the rest of the cake, I painted luster dust all over the rest of the cake, too. When I was done, my cake looked more like a disco ball than a fountain. And not a tasteful, restrained, silver disco ball. A ridiculous, garish, rainbow-colored disco ball.

On the bright side, the fountain-ness of it functioned quite well. I realized at the last minute that the bowl the cake was in would be nowhere near big enough to contain all the drips and splashes from the fountain, so I had a friend of mine bring a big silver tray to the art show to put the cake on. I had bought several gallons of cranberry juice to use instead of water, so I poured that in and plugged in the pump. I hadn’t gotten the angle on the tubing just right, so at first the juice all sprayed down one side of the fish. I had to prop one side up a bit with a stack of napkins to get it to flow evenly. I was glad that I had decided to use different types of sugar, because that really did enhance the texture of the melting.

I don’t recall exactly why I decided that the fountain should spray something red. Perhaps I didn’t exactly decide; perhaps after so many gory cakes blood red is just my default setting. My finance professor told me that I should have used Cabernet. He was right, it would have been classier to use wine, but I was too cheap to spend much money on a drink that was obviously going to be useless once it was all gummed up with melted sugar. And it did get gross – you have no idea how bubbly and sticky and gooey cranberry juice full of sugar and fondant can be.

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.

Gelatinous Man Cake

The Gelatinous Man was created for a small art show that some friends and I were hosting at my business school. Very few people at the show actually believed that he was cake until I cut into him, but then everyone agreed that he was delicious. One boy even expressed delight at the way the eyeball squished when he bit into it.

The concept for the Gelatinous Man developed out of a cake that I made when I was taking a Master Class from Colette Peters at the Wilton School for Cake Decorating and Confectionary Art. I referred to it as a Sea God cake. It was essentially a standard 3-tiered cake with a raised face on top spitting out a fountain of gum paste water. This got Colette and I talking about making a cake that had an entire man trapped inside, trying to get out. Naturally, when I finally got around to making the cake, it came out all oozy and bloody and moist. And so the Gelatinous Man was born. Or at least he's on the verge of being born. Or possibly he's just been absorbed into his odd, oozing sack. I can't say for sure. You'd have to ask him.

The first step was to make the base, which is simply two circles of 3/8" foam core glued together, one larger than the other. The smaller circle is only there to make it easier to pick up the cake by leaving a space under the upper plate to get your fingers into. It's a little trick I learned from watching cake competitions on the Food Network. The larger circle is covered with fondant, marbled with some royal blue food coloring. Just knead some of the color into the fondant until you come up with a cool marble texture, and then roll it out to about 1/8" thickness. It's very easy to stick the fondant to the foam core by brushing it with water.

I started in on the cake itself by baking four 10" round cakes, using a really great chocolate cake recipe I got from one of Colette's books. I then torted and filled these with a plain chocolate ganache. Because the cake was so tall I had to put a layer of 3/16" foam core, supported by 1/4" dowels, in the middle. I also put a 3/16" foam core circle on the bottom of the cake to make it moveable before it was mounted on the final base. Both pieces of foam core were only 9" in diameter, instead of the 10" diameter of the cake so I would be free to carve into the cake without worrying about running into the foamcore.

Now for the fun part - carving the cake into the shape of a man trapped in some sort of membranous sack. I had a little sketch, which I had made in the margins of my Operations notebook during class. So I was sculpting a cake while consulting my Operations notes. I found this juxtaposition perhaps unduly amusing, because, as anyone else out there who has gone to business school doubtless already knows, Operations is about the most tedious class in existence (Sorry, Professor Rappold.) and I'm not just saying that because, as I write this, my final Operations project is due in eight hours. Using a paring knife, I started by cutting away the area around the face, the hands, one foot, and one knee. I carved the back into a slope with a ridge of spine running down the middle, then added a little butt crack at the bottom. I had to add some extra pieces to the top of the cake to get the requisite height on the fingers of Gelatinous Man's right hand.

Once I had the basic shape, I sealed the entire cake with a crumb coat of royal icing. Royal icing isn't the greatest tasting icing, of course, but I needed the stability of it to hold up to all the brushing and sculpting that would be required in subsequent steps. I had to wait for that crumb coat to dry before I could proceed to the next step.

My plan was to sculpt the details of the features by piping them on in essentially the right place, then smoothing and making fine detail with a damp paint brush. My first attempt at this failed because the water on the brush diluted the icing so much that it couldn't maintain its shape. So I scraped it off and started over again with much thicker icing, to the point where I could barely squeeze it out of the bag, and a slightly drier brush. This worked much better.

It took me two passes through using this technique to get the finished shape. The first pass created all the major shapes - toes and palms and cheeks, even details like the creases in the finger joints. The second pass added more fine details and built up heavily frosted areas like the heel, but mostly focused on stretching out the icing between elevated area - between the finger and the spine, for instance, and between the toes and the chin - to make it seem like Gelatinous Man was writhing inside and struggling against a contiguous membranous sack.

I ran into some difficulty with the nose. I couldn't make it as prominent as I wanted to because the icing wasn't sturdy enough and kept slumping into his open mouth. Clearly I needed something structural to stick into the cake to build the nose around. It needed to be edible, so I ran around my apartment for a while like a chicken with my head cut off, looking for a pretzel, which I already knew I didn't have. Then I stumbled across a packet of Lik-M-Aid that a friend gave me for Valentines Day. The little candy stick, which was already broken in half, was perfect. I stuck the broken end into the cake and built up a frosting nose around the protruding rounded end.

Now for color. My plan was to just add color to the regions that protruded, as if the sack was white but thin, so the flesh color underneath only showed through where Gelatinous Man was exerting pressure on his membranous prison. That plan didn't really pan out because I got carried away with the airbrush, and the whole thing ended up fleshier than I had anticipated. So I made the protrusive parts even darker and redder. Then I sprayed some dark blue and purple vein-ish lines along the stretched membrane areas. I believe that while, obviously, red is important for blood, in order to really evoke gore, you need blues as well. I also added some blue in the as-yet-empty eye sockets and red inside the mouth.

To complete the eyes, I piped in big blobs of clear piping gel for the irises then added royal icing whites over top of the piping gel. A bright red piping gel tongue enhanced the mouth.

With that I was ready to transfer Gelatinous Man onto his blue fondant-covered base. Considering that I was by myself, this went remarkably smoothly and I even got him relatively centered. To clean things up I piped a bead of royal icing around the seam between the cake and the base, and then smoothed it with a damp paintbrush. While I had the icing out, I put some little teeth in Gelatinous Man's mouth.

Now I had a good shape and some decent colors, but the cake still didn't sing. For one thing, it was too neat - no damp oozing, no blood - and for another thing, Gelatinous Man wasn't integrated with his base to create a unified piece.

To create the oozing, damp look I was going for, I made some very, very thin royal icing and used a paintbrush to apply it to the cake. Naturally, such watery icing pooled in the crevices and around the bottom of the cake, giving more of an illusion of depth and an indication of moist membrane. A somewhat unforeseen but beneficial effect of the dripping icing was that it made the airbrushed colors run and bleed. I think it made it look much more natural and frankly, I should have known that was going to happen, since I know that airbrush colors don't really set. It took three coats of this watery icing to really get the depth I was looking for, and by that time a whole bunch of icing had pooled on the base, so that Gelatinous Man appeared to be sitting in a puddle of his own melting flesh. It was a nice look, and effectively joined Gelatinous Man visually with his base.

I almost called it quits at this point, but I still thought it needed a little more, and I had a bunch of piping gel lying around. So I whipped up two different colors of red piping gel - a deep burgundy and a bright red. I painted a stripe of blue food coloring on the inside of a piping bag (I told you I'm a big fan of judicious use of blue in my gore effects.) fitted with a #8 round tip and filled it with the darker red piping gel. It was a little hard to control the piping gel on the vertical surfaces, but I ended up pretty happy with my big veins, so I then used the bright red piping gel in a bag with a #6 tip to make the smaller veins.

Now I had blood, but was once again faced with a piece that seemed unfinished. One more coat of watery icing did the trick, blending the veins into the cake, melting them just enough to make them seem integrated into the membrane rather than disconnected and sitting on top.

Once again I almost called it done. Then I remembered that I had bought a bag of marshmallows in the hopes of melting them into some sort of fibrous tendrils. This worked really well when I tried it on a practice bowl, but less well when I tried it on the cake because it was still a little wet so the marshmallow wouldn't stick easily. So I only used a little bit, but I still think it added a nice touch and it'll probably be a good technique to have in my arsenal in the future. Easy, too - I just popped the marshmallow in the microwave for fifteen seconds, and then stuck it wherever I wanted it with the tip of a knife. I only used three of the marshmallows, but I have since eaten the entire rest of the bag.

I could probably have gone on poking and prodding at this cake forever until it was just an indistinguishable blob of yuckiness, but fortunately, I ran out of time at this point and had to decide that I was done. I think it has firmly established me as the weirdest member of my MBA class.

Jellyfish Cake

One of the first things that I did when I arrived at MBA school was to brag to my new friends about my cake-making prowess. Naturally, my bravado was met with a request for a birthday cake. At this point I had known the birthday girl for all of two months. Not having that much to go on in terms of personalizing the cake, I decided to make a glowing jellyfish, based solely on the fact that she had happened to mention a recent trip to the aquarium.

The plan was for me to serve this cake during class at our Arts Administration Seminar, which meant that I had to transport it from my apartment to school. Naturally, I responded to this requirement by making a cake based on one of the most delicate, ethereal creatures on earth.

Because I wanted the jellyfish to glow from within, my first step was to make a hollow dome of hard sugar to serve as the bell of the jellyfish through which the light would shine. This marked my second attempt to make such a sugar dome (the first being the Cyndi Lauper cake) and it remains a very difficult thing to accomplish (or at least a very difficult thing for me to accomplish.) I used a metal bowl as the mold, covered with tin foil because I wasn't confident in my ability to release the sugar from the bowl otherwise. The problem with tin foil, of course, is that it doesn't lie perfectly flat and thus has a tendency to form ridges that get stuck in the sugar and have to be carefully pried out with tweezers and/or melted out with a wet paintbrush. The other huge problem that I always have in making sugar domes is that melted sugar, being a liquid, has a strong tendency to flow down the side of the bowl and thus form a deformed letter "o" with a bowl in the middle, rather than a dome. I counteracted this downward tendency by continually pulling the sugar back up the side of the bowl with a spoon until it cooled and hardened enough to stay in place. As you can imagine, this didn't result in the pristine, glasslike surface that I would have liked, so I had to settle for a streaky, lumpy jellyfish bell.

Next, I needed to get my glowing mechanism functional. My plan was very simple - put some Christmas lights between the cake on the inside and the sugar dome on the outside, forming the bell of the jellyfish. Obviously, in order to have some sense of the jellyfish floating gracefully in the ocean, I would need to raise this bell up on a pedestal from which the arms and tentacles could descend. I bought an acrylic cake stand that consisted of a round acrylic plate that sat atop a 6" diameter acrylic cylinder. In order to run the Christmas lights down from the bell, I drilled a hole in the top plate. This also allowed me to wad some of the Christmas lights inside the cylinder so that the tentacles would also glow from within. The strand of Christmas lights was too long for me to fit all of them into the cylinder and I still needed a way to get the plug out of the cake and into the outlet, so I mounted the acrylic cake stand onto a silver tray, which I also drilled a hole in so that the Christmas lights could come out the bottom of the tray. Then I took the remaining Christmas lights and taped them to the bottom of the tray, carefully, so that it was still able to sit relatively stably. This had the pleasant effect of making the cake appear to be floating on a bed of light, as if, perhaps, some phosphorescent fish were swimming around in the depths below.

To make the acrylic cylinder look more like a life form and less like an architectural necessity, I piped vertical stripes of royal icing all around it, using a big round tip. I think it was a #8. Because I was going for an organic look, I deliberately let some of the lines curve and slump a bit.

There wasn't a whole lot of room for the actual cake, but fortunately it only needed to serve eight people. I made a 6" round cake, carved it into a hemisphere and covered it with fondant. The cake fit easily into the center of the circle of Christmas lights, and I slathered on a whole mess of royal icing to conceal the green cord. I plopped the sugar dome over top of everything and more or less had a proto-jellyfish. But it still needed a lot of work.

For one thing, I wasn't happy with an all-white jellyfish, though in retrospect, it may have maintained a more ethereal quality with a more muted palette. Instead, I piped on a bunch of bright red and blue piping gel and painted the royal icing around the cylinder with food coloring to match.

At this point it looked more like an eerily glowing mushroom than a jellyfish. I needed life. I needed movement. I needed fondant tentacles. I had the good sense to leave these mostly white, with just some blue and purple edging and red accents on the tips, which certainly kept them more ghostly than they would have been with more color.

My next problem was that the acrylic circle of my cake stand was about two inches bigger in diameter than my sugar dome, so I needed some way to conceal the overhang. I used a big star tip to pipe a sort of elongated inverted shell border around the perimeter of the dome. Apparently the inverted shell border is a bit of a go-to decorating technique for me when trying to conceal imperfections. I went on to use it again on my niece's first birthday cake, with similarly unimpressive results. I also went in around the base of the cake with piping gel tinted blue to indicate water.

My jellyfish still looked too static for my taste, so I made some wispy royal icing arms to set round the edge of the bell. I attached them to the cake before I realized that would doubtless break during transport so I took them back off and painted them with some blue and green luster dust. I guess because I had the luster dust in hand I went a little shine-crazy at this point, slinging utterly garish amounts of blue, purple, and gold luster dust all over the place. Sometimes I just lose control of my paintbrush.

I had a bit of trouble transporting the cake to school because I drive a little pickup truck, which is great for buying lumber and for piling all your stuff in the back and moving across the country, but not very good for transporting cakes. Obviously it would be unwise to just chuck the cake into the bed, so I had to put it in front. Sadly, it wouldn't fit in the footwell, so I had to put it on the passenger seat, which, being designed for human butts, not for cakes, is neither flat nor level. I also had to drive down my driveway, which was both steep and bumpy. The upshot of all this was that the cake got knocked around a bit in transit and I had to make some repairs on site, as well as attach the wispy arms around the perimeter.

In conclusion, this was by no means my greatest moment as a cake decorator, but my friend still seemed to appreciate it.

Gingerbread Swamp House

This gingerbread house was inspired by my recent trip to New Orleans. I took a walking tour of the Garden District, which, by the way, I recommend to any of you should you happen to find yourselves with a free day in New Orleans. The stunning ironwork was what first caught my attention. Fortunately, my parents had just given me a digital camera for my birthday, so I spent the rest of the afternoon happily snapping close-up of delicate architectural details.

I'm not very good at making nice, normal, friendly gingerbread houses, so, naturally, I decided that this should be a dilapidated bayou house, complete with alligator, rowboat, and swamp water.

The basic pattern of the house was remarkably easy (Though not so easy that I didn't manage to cut the roof pieces too short, but that's a story for later on in my gingerbread saga.), consisting simply of four sides, two rectangular balconies, and four long roof pieces. It took me almost no time to draft the patterns for those, which was good because it took me hours to draft the patterns for the intricate railing and decorative grillwork I had planned for the balconies.

That was all the prep work I could do until the week before Christmas, as I was planning to spend Christmas in California with my sister and royal icing balcony rails can hardly be expected to survive a trip across a room, let alone a trip across the country.

Finally, my big travel day arrived and, gingerbread plans carefully packing in my carry-on bag (so I wouldn't have to do without them for even a day in the event that there was a problem with my checked luggage) I hied myself to LaGuardia and boarded my plane.

Within but a few hours of my arrival in San Francisco (where I rendezvoused with our parents, who had flown in from Michigan for the occasion) I was hard at work rolling and cutting gingerbread pieces. You see, I had to have them baked and ready, as Gingerbreadfest was the next day! Gingerbreadfest is the biggest of our annual craft parties. We have to provide all of our friends with pre-made gingerbread house pieces, all manner of candy decorations, and approximately twenty gallons of royal icing with which to stick everything together.

Actually, it turned out that it really didn't matter that I had the gingerbread pieces baked in time for Gingerbreadfest, as it took me all day just to pipe the tiny royal icing grillwork, using a #1 tip. Frankly, Gingerbreadfest isn't a great time for either my sister or I to get much work done on our own gingerbread houses, as we have to spend most of the time replenishing candy bowls, mixing batches of icing, and assembling everyone's houses. It's all worth it though, just to see what everyone comes up with. The undisputed triumph of Gingerbreadfest this year was the gingerbread rebel stronghold, complete with guard tower and bomb shelter entrance, which our youngest guest (age five) made out of the little leftover pieces (doors, chimneys, etc.) of other houses. I helped.

Even the day after Gingerbreadfest, the only thing I had a chance to do to the gingerbread pieces themselves was to glue the balconies to the front of the house with some thick royal icing. I then spent most of the day running Christmas related errands, so all I had time to do that evening was cut fifty sticks of peppermint chewing gum into tiny bricks, then paint them various shades of brown and red.

Once I finally started decorating the actual house, things went quite smoothly. The balconies were the first pieces I tackled. I frosted both sides of these with slightly thin, brown royal icing, and then scored the icing with a toothpick to create planking. For maximum verisimilitude, I tinted some of the boards with various shades of red and yellow food coloring.

I glued the chewing gum bricks to the side and back pieces with a thin layer of grey royal icing and covered the front of the house with slats made of thinly rolled fondant. I also made shutters for all the windows out of rolled fondant, scored with a toothpick. I then piped royal icing frames around all the windows, doors, and shutters using a wide, flat decorating tip while watching the thematically appropriate, yet woefully incomprehensible movie Eaten Alive.

Finally, the exciting moment of assembly arrived! I had cut a one-foot square base out of 3/8" foamcore, to which I glued first the back, then the sides and front of the house. It went together pretty well. I always get a certain amount of warping and curvature in the gingerbread pieces as they bake, which results in some gaps in the assembled structure. I understand that some people recut each piece after baking before the pieces is cooled for greater accuracy. I should try that next year. In this case, however, the gaps were minimal and easily covered with the careful application of a few more chewing gum bricks.

Now we come to my greatest error in judgment - the roof pieces. I'm not quite sure whether the house was more out of whack than it looked or whether I just cut the roof pieces too small, but when I went to attach the roof pieces, they were too short to sit on top of the sides of the house as they were intended to. If I had been clever I could have built up the sides with some royal icing and allowed that to dry prior to attaching the roof pieces. I'm not that clever, so I just glooped on a whole mess of royal icing to fill the gaps and held my breath until it dried, hoping that the entire roof wouldn't just sink into the body of the house. In the end, the problems with the roof turned out to be rather fortuitous, as one end of the roof sagged threateningly and greatly enhanced the dilapidated look of the house, which was, of course, what I was going for in the first place.

With roof pieces safely in place, I set about tiling the roof using little squares of fondant, about 1/2" on each side. I made two colors of tile, one a deep purple marbled with some black, the other a deep green, also marbled with black. Then I applied the two colors at random, to nice effect. I also attached the shutters at this point, some open, some closed, some on the verge of falling off entirely.

With the structure of the house in place, it was time to paint! I distressed everything, using mostly green, red, black, yellow, and brown food coloring. Prior to this point, the siding on the front of the house, the window trim, and the shutters were pristine white. By the time I was done, they looked like they had been sitting in the swamp for a century. I also ran a coat of water across the roof to give a damp sheen to the fondant tiles.

Now it was time to make the finishing touches - a little rowboat and oars, the pier for it to dock at, and the giant alligator to menace anyone who might be foolish enough to venture forth into the ominous swamp around the house. All these I sculpted from fondant, white for the alligator, marbleized brown for the rowboat and pier.

The pier was easily made by rolling out a strip of fondant and scoring it with a toothpick to make individual boards. I also distressed the ends of the boards for that all-important aged look. The legs of the pier are simply little rolled cylinders of fondant. The boat was also quite simple to make, but took a little longer, mostly because the first one I made was ridiculously out of scale so I had to make another one.

The alligator was, of course, my biggest sculptural challenge of this project, but fortunately I made gum paste frogs a few months ago for a friend's wedding cake, and the skills are quite similar. I pulled a good research picture off the internet and set to work. Once I had the basic shape of the body and head, I added textural detail to the hide with a toothpick and with a star decorating tip. I made eyeballs by gently pressing in a #8 decorating tip and nostrils with, I believe, a #3. I then propped the mouth open with a folded bit of was paper and left it to dry.

The first step in landscaping around the house was to build up a hill in back of it with a wad of fondant, so it appeared to be fronting on the swamp, while the land rose behind the house. Then I attached the pier leading to the front door. In retrospect, it might have been easier to pipe the grass under the pier before I attached the pier, but it's too late for that now.

I used a grass tip to cover the entire area around the house with two shades of slightly unhealthy green icing and one of sickly yellow icing. While I was doing this, I also attached the delicate grilles to the front of the house. To say that it was nerve wracking working with those tiny, fragile pieces would be a tremendous understatement, particularly as I had neglected to make any extras of one section of the grille. To be more accurate, I made two sets of everything, thinking I would then have extras in case anything broke, forgetting that I needed two sets of some pieces anyway. Astonishingly, nothing broke except one tiny edge, which was easily repaired. Once I was breathing normally again, I finished piping all of the grass, then added and painted a little royal icing trim around the tops of the decorative grilles.

My plan for the swamp was to use Jell-O. In order to prevent the hot, liquid Jell-O from simply pouring over the side of the house's base and onto my sister's new table I had to made a dam around the edge of the base. I first tried to do this with royal icing, but I didn't like the results, so I scraped it off and made a new dam out of thick fondant, cut into strips and painted deep blues, greens, and blacks.

I decided to experiment with the Jell-O before pouring it onto the front of the actual house. I'm extremely glad I did, because it turns out that Jell-O is totally incompatible both with royal icing and with fondant. My experimental bowls wound up looking like hideous biological specimens in Petri dishes. The Jell-O dissolved both the royal icing and the fondant, then failed to set up properly, resulting in a gooey, bubbling mess, made all the grosser by the fact that I had added altogether too much blue food coloring to the Jell-O.

Scrapping the Jell-O, I turned to Plan B - piping gel. I had no idea that piping gel could be made at home, having always purchased it ready made from a cake decorating store, but Mom suggested that I look for a recipe online. She was right. I found a recipe in no time, which is a very good thing, because by this time it was Christmas, so it wasn't as if I could just run out and buy piping gel. My first batch of piping gel turned out too thin. I wanted it to be thin enough to flow under the pier and around the grillwork posts, but not thin enough that it would never set up. I tried again and the second batch seemed more promising.

After the Jell-O fiasco, I was careful to experiment with the piping gel before applying it to the house. This time, all went well. The royal icing and fondant samples seemed to suffer no ill effects from the piping gel, so I called it a go. This time I only added a smidgen of blue coloring to the gel.

I wanted to place the alligator before piping the gel onto the actual house. That way it could appear to be partially submerged, as if it were in the process of emerging from the swamp. In the end, I think I chickened out a little because I was afraid the detail of the alligator would be obscured by the piping gel, so it only ended up with one foot in the swamp.

Before I could place the alligator I had to paint it. I used shades of yellow, red, brown, and green food coloring, then added tiny royal icing ridges to his back and royal icing teeth to his mouth with a #1 decorator tip. He was then ready to effectively menace the inhabitants of the swamp house! I set him in place on the edge of the swamp.

The big swamp water moment had arrived! I dumped the whole sticky mess of piping gel into a piping bag with a #8 tip, and started slowly piping the gel in front of the house. Everything was going well until I hit one of the grillwork columns with my decorating tip and smashed it! There ensued an extremely tense period in which I performed some emergency surgery to replace the broken piece with a spare column, a process which involved very carefully trimming the new piece down to size with a pair of tweezers. I'm proud to report that the operation was a complete success!

With infinitely more care, I continued piping in the gel until the entire swamp in front of the house was full, as well as little sinkhole in the back of the house. It looked great, if I do say so myself. The royal icing grass was visible beneath the surface, and I could even see reflections of the house in the surface of the piping gel! Now, two weeks later, the gel still has yet to set up completely, but I don't think that's really a big deal.

The house was almost done, but something was still missing. I thought about putting some sort of decoration along the ridge of the roof, but then my sister and I hit on the answer - a weather vane! After settling on the traditional rooster design, I piped a weather vane in royal icing onto some wax paper. Once dry, and painted green and black, the weathervane proved exceedingly fragile and difficult to attach to the roof, but, six or seven repairs later, I finally had it in place.

I was finished at last! And it was still Christmas day! Between the success of my gingerbread house, the awesome quilt my sister made for me, and my parents' gift of another trip to the fabulous Wilton School ofCake Decorating, I think it was my best Christmas yet!

Cyndi Lauper Cake

This cake was intended to be presented to Cyndi Lauper on The Graham Norton Effect. Unfortunately, it didn't survive being FedExed from Colorado to New York.

As my mom pointed out to me, I had no idea five or so years ago when my sister and I started theyrecoming.com (our horror movie review website) into what strange adventures it might soon lead me. The one it's led me into most recently involved sculpting a bust of Cyndi Lauper in cake to be FedExed to New York City and presented to Cyndi on a show called The Graham Norton Effect, which I had never even heard of until they contacted me about two months ago. Evidently, someone at the show had found their way to theyrecoming.com and seen the photos of my thoracic cavity cake and my zombie cake. Initially, they wanted me to make a werewolf cake for Seth Green, but they didn't give me enough lead time and I was really busy that weekend, so I had to tell them no, but please keep me in mind for the future. The next time they contacted me they wanted a cake for Cyndi Lauper and, as they gave me a few weeks notice this time and I'm a sucker for rock of the 80's, I enthusiastically agreed, providing they could come up with a way to transport the cake from the little Colorado mountain town where I spend my summers to the Big Apple.

I decided to make the cake a portrait of Cyndi with her mouth open, singing or possibly screaming, however one wants to interpret it. Behind the head, which was to be made out of cake, the hair would be a big dome of colorful hard candy with a light bulb underneath. My goal was to give the impression of something along the lines of a Tiffany lampshade. The folks at The Graham Norton Effect were excited about the idea, so I set about the planning and supplying stages. I believe I've mentioned before that I spend the summers in a little town about two hours away from the nearest big city, so supplies are a bit harder to obtain here than usual. Fortunately, the internet knows no petty geographical bounds, so I was able to order some powdered food colors and cocoa butter, which I didn't end up using after all and my sister sent me some paste colors and paintbrushes and luster dust and suchlike from California.

The weekend before the weekend I was to make the cake I was planning to drive to Indiana for a friend's wedding. Yes, I drove eighteen hours just to go to one party, then turned around and drove back. I loved every minute of it. This afforded me an opportunity to pick up supplies at places like Home Depot and Wal-Mart. I was looking for a good, battery-operated method of lighting up the sugar dome, but I never came up with one that I was really satisfied with, so I went with the tried and true method of a plug in light bulb. I also needed a big metal bowl, which I planned to cover with tin foil and use as a mold for the sugar dome. I found one at Wal-Mart that I thought would be perfect. As it turns out, I was wrong.

I returned to Colorado on the evening of Tuesday, September 7 and the cake was due to be shipped to New York on Monday, September 13 for a taping on Tuesday, September 14. The next day I got up and drove forty-five minutes to the nearest Safeway to get all my supplies (mostly sugar and corn syrup, neither of which, as it turned out, I bought nearly enough of.) My goal for that evening was to make the sugar hair dome. I covered the top of my kitchen table with tin foil, then set the bowl on top of some tuna cans to give it a bit more height and covered it with tin foil as well. Using the hard candy recipe from my favorite candy cookbook (The Practical Candymaking Cookbook) my plan was to first create an under layer of clear (or as clear as cooked sugar gets, which is sort of amber) sugar then pour various bright colors of sugar onto that to give the impression of wavy hair. I had forgotten to ask my sister to send me my good candy thermometer, so I bought a cheap one at Safeway, which evidently is cheap for a very good reason. It worked fine for the first batch or two of candy, then condensation formed inside it which made it impossible to read and when I tried to wipe off the inside I inadvertently moved the paper scale inside so it ceased to be accurate at all. I gave up on the thermometer altogether after a while and went by the sound of the bubbling and the color of the sugar. I think I did a remarkably good job of it, too, if I do say so myself.

Building up the preliminary shell of clear sugar went fairly well expect that it was impossible to get it smooth because of the steep slope of the sides of the bowl. Eventually I had a fairly even coating of clear sugar and proceeded to the colored sugar, which was a complete failure. My plan had been to spoon the colored sugar into attractive swirls of hair but this proved to be impossible to do with any kind grace or precision on such a steep slope, so I just ended up with sort of messy wedges of red and purple sugar, which looked really sloppy and non-specific. I set that one aside (just in case I wanted it again later) and started again.

This time my plan was to draw specific wavy hair shapes onto the tin foil over the bowl with royal icing, then fill the spaces with clear sugar, which I would then paint bright colors with food coloring. I took me two tries to get royal icing shapes I was happy with (and this time I didn't set the bowl onto the tuna cans so it was bit shorter) and it proved difficult again to fill the more vertical surfaces of the bowl neatly. I had to do it with my little metal pastry tube from the sixties, which my sister got me at a garage sale or flea market or something, which is awesome because they're pretty much impossible to find. This is a very time-consuming process and it involved a lot of me burning myself with hot sugar. About halfway through the process I ran out of sugar and went to bed.

By the time I woke up the next morning. I had an even better idea - I would start over with a solid, clear sugar shell, then drizzle bright colors of sugar over it in abstract patterns. This would eliminate my difficulty in forming neat, specific shapes and give the cake a wild, carefree look, which I felt would be appropriate to Cyndi Lauper. This was also the day I had planned to bake the cake itself, which I had to do in my friend's cabin because I don't have an oven. I also borrowed a bowl similar to the one I had bought but slightly smaller on which to create my new sugar dome. This way I could start on a new dome without trashing the half-finished dome I had been working on the night before (just in case.) This time I created a more graceful shape (I hoped) than the natural shape of the bowl by taping pieces of paper over it to the bowl and to the table to form ogee-like curves. It formed a good shape, but made the finished product harder to remove from the table.

I spent the morning running back and forth between the two cabins, coating the bowl with clear sugar and baking three 6" round cakes, using a recipe for white cake I got from a book by Colette Peters. This was my first experience baking at a high altitude (about 8,300 feet) so I was a little nervous, but it seemed to go really well. I went online to get tips on high altitude baking (increase eggs, decrease baking powder, decrease sugar, etc.) I followed those and it went without a hitch expect that it seemed to take longer to bake than I expected, but maybe the oven just wasn't as hot as it said it was.

By three in the afternoon I had all the cakes baked and most of a good, solid layer of sugar on the bowl and I had to go to work for a few hours. By the time I came back the sugar on the bowl had had a chance to cool completely, which, I discovered, was a very bad thing. The first time I poured another coat of hot sugar onto a thin spot, the sugar dome started to crack. Evidently sugar can't take that quick a change in temperature. This was make even worse by the fact that I had, for some inexplicable reason, removed the sugar dome from its supporting structure of bowl and paper and even in some sections started to remove the underlining of tinfoil (to assure myself that it was possible), so the hot sugar started drooping through cracks and the dome started to sag. I hurriedly pressed the still-pliable sugar into a tolerable shape and put the bowl back underneath. Clearly, I would have to re-coat the entire dome with hot sugar before I started drizzling hot colored sugar onto it or the whole thing would crack apart. I tried to warm up the sugar dome by setting it in front of the radiator and by rubbing it with a hot, damp sponge, but that didn't help much. Every time I poured more hot sugar onto a cool section of the dome, more cracks appeared. Finally, I had a very thick layer of sugar on everything and all the cracks were sealed and covered up. (By this time I had also made two additional trips to the little grocery store across the street to buy more sugar and corn syrup. I bought pretty much all the corn syrup they had. Ordinarily things are much more expensive there than at a big grocery store, but fortunately the corn syrup was inexplicably cheaper.) I was ready to start on the colored sugar. Finally, something went right and the sugar drizzling went smoothly and looked good. I used bright red, bright purple, and bright greenish-blue. Once this cooled I pulled it off the form and peeled away the tin foil. This was easier said than done and I had to use tweezers to get the foil out of a few of the crevices, but eventually I got (almost) all of it.

Finally my sugar dome was ready and I was ready to start sculpting the cake. I didn't have my cake leveler so I had to eyeball it, but fortunately the cakes were small in diameter so it was pretty easy. I filled the cake with raspberry jam, then, working from a photo I found online, carved it into the rough shape of Cyndi's head with an open mouth. I gave the leftover cake bits to my friend who lent me her oven. To crumbcoat the head I used an apricot glaze, made by boiling and straining apricot jam.

Next, I mounted the head onto a neck, which I had made by stacking circles and oblong shapes of clear sugar on top of each other. This, I hoped, would look more graceful than simply plopping a severed head onto a tray. There's a reason why classical busts always include the shoulders.

My plan at this point had been to use white modeling chocolate to sculpt the facial features, but an old problem I had the first time I used white modeling chocolate resurfaced. Evidently I had added too much corn syrup because the modeling chocolate was very sticky and didn't set up right. I also had a hard time getting it to stay in place on the cake. I went to my backup plan, which was to use royal icing. Unfortunately, in the process of removing the modeling chocolate I had already put on, I ripped the nose off of the cake, so I would have to build it up again with icing. I put a preliminary coat of royal icing onto the whole head and went to bed to let it dry.

The next day, for some incomprehensible reason, I tried the modeling chocolate again. Again, it failed miserably and pulled off some of the royal icing in the process, so I had to redo it. Eventually, I had a good base coat of royal icing on the head and a royal icing beaded necklace around each tier of the sugar neck and could position the head and the sugar hair on the plywood circle I had cut to use as a base. The lightbulb was already mounted to the base, wired and ready to go. I had to move it once because the head sat further back than I expected, but that was easily accomplished. By some miracle the head and neck together were actually the right height to fit with the hair and the whole structure together seemed remarkably stable, a major concern for a cake that had to travel across the country. I lit it up to see what it looked like and was thrilled with the result!

I used a large #12 round decorating tip and a medium #6 round decorating tip to pipe in royal icing features like lips, nose, ears, and cheekbones, then carefully smoothed and shaped them with a slightly damp, soft paintbrush. I put in a tongue and eyelids with a flat #104 decorating tip and again smoothed with the paintbrush. The nose took two applications to get it built up enough, but all in all it was quite successful. I even added a uvula at the back of the throat.

Once the royal icing had dried overnight, I was ready to paint the face. I had gotten powdered food coloring to use when I thought I would be painting onto white modeling chocolate, but with the royal icing I could use paste colors, thinned with water. First the skin tone went on, then rouge, lipstick, and bright, gaudy pink and green eyeshadow. I also painted each beaded necklace a different bright color. Then I added more details with royal icing, such as eyebrows and eyelashes and a head scarf to cover the less-than-perfect edge of the sugar dome hair, then painted those. I used some gold luster dust on the lips and blue luster dust on the eyelids to make it shine and used a few little drops of sugar I had saved for earrings and ornaments on the head scarf. Oh, at some point in there I decided that I didn't like the shape of the lips and had to go back and add more royal icing and touch up the paint job. The finished skin was a little lumpier than would have been ideal, but other than that, and a slightly odd chin shape due to some frosting sagging, I'd say it wasn't half bad.

Finally my cake was done! Hooray! Now my only problem was packing and freezing it for transport. The packing method I came up with pretty darned smart, if I do say so myself. Like many of my "brilliant" ideas, it came to me as I was drifting off to sleep. First I covered the cake in plastic wrap, then tied it inside a plastic bag. I cut another plywood circle, about two inches bigger in diameter than the one on which the cake was mounted. I screwed the cake base to this so it wouldn't shift around. ThenI wrapped about six layers of cardboard around this, forming a squat little tube, the excess space of which I filled with foam peanuts, then closed the top with a triple layer of cardboard. The result looked a lot like a giant hatbox and was far too large to fit in a standard freezer. Fortunately (and this is one of the big advantages of living in a small town) I have a friend who runs a restaurant and he let me stick the cake in his giant freezer.

On Monday morning, I got up, fetched the cake, then spent three hours waiting around for FedEx to arrive to pick it up. He had a little trouble finding my cabin because the street address isn't actually posted anywhere on the property but I guided him in by phone and a few minutes later my rustic little cake was on its merry way to the big city! Sounds like the premise for a Broadway musical, doesn't it?

Sadly, perhaps cakes were not meant to be shipped cross-country as I'm told the cake arrived in New York broken. I never knew what, precisely, was broken or to what extent, but evidently the damage was severe enough to preclude the use of the cake on the show, because it never put in an appearance (though my name did appear for about a third of a second in the special thanks section of the credits.) I like to think that someone showed the photos of the cake I sent to Cyndi Lauper. I also like to envision the crew of the show munching on Cyndi Lauper's smushed face in the break room.

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.