Finished Project

Wow! Am I glad that is over!! It was pretty stressful for me, but I think it turned out well. This is only the second cake I've done for a "client" and I am still learning how things work. I really should take a class, I'd probably save myself a lot of grief. Maybe someday...

Here is a picture of the cakes with their fondant coverings and the bottom layer wrapped in its gumpaste "ribbon." That ended up being trickier than I thought it would be. I had this super long piece of ribbon to wind around the cake and I didn't think to coil it up initially, so I just brought the cake to the ribbon and spun the cake around and tried to lift the ribbon, there were a few small tears, but it was covered up by the bow later so it all worked out! As you can see, I still struggle getting everything level and I had more trouble with my fondant this time around. I think I rolled it too thin. You could see the chocolate icing a bit and it's bubbly. I'll do better next time!

Here is a picture of one of the bows. I followed the How To Make a Gumpaste Bow tutorial off the Cakecentral website with a few minor adjustments. I ended up needing to roll my gumpaste out on shortening, not powdered sugar, and then lightly dusting them with powdered sugar before adding their Luster Dust shine. I love luster dust! It's my new favorite product!!

After I made the bows I stacked my cakes. Always a bit nerve-wracking but it went pretty smoothly. The top layer I made 7up cake and used a Lemon Cream Cheese icing. Both were super tasty, just not very good for layer cakes. The cake was too spongy and the icing was just the wrong consistency and didn't firm up enough for me. I'd use it as a filling though. I used bubble tea straws for my supports and foam board covered in foil for the cake bases.


Next came the frozen buttercream transfers (FBCT). I had a picture of the FBCTs in my last post, but I didn't take pictures of the actual transfer. It went fairly smoothly on the emblem, but it needed a good amount of touch up. The writing didn't go well at all, I ended up freehanding it, but it was kind of nice to have a bit of a guide. You can see the emblem well in the picture above.


This is a picture of one of the things I was dreading the most-- the center dowel! I read numerous posts on CakeCentral about transporting cakes and all said you needed the center dowel. The process for those of you who don't know, is to take a wooden craft dowel, sharpen one end of it with a pencil sharpener and then drive it through all the tiers of your cake. Sounds insane doesn't it? Sounds like there is no way a cake can survive that. Drive it through the foam board? And not demolish the layer underneath??? And can you really sharpen a dowel with a mere pencil sharpener? Alright you may be wiser than I am, but this whole process seemed impossible to me. It all worked just like they said though. I sharpened the dowel, drove it down as far as a I could, used a hammer to drive it down through the foam board and tuh duh! You can kind of see the dowel sticking out the top. Not the best photo sorry...
With that done it was time to figure out how to cover up the snipped dowel. Flowers ofcourse! I used some left over gumpaste to form little roses and dyed some leftover fondant green for the leaves, mounded up some royal icing on top and went to work. The picture above shows the cake nearly complete. I had to wait until I got to the church to put the bows on though. Here is a close up shot of the flowers and the mysterious "165."

Now we come to the second thing I was terrified of- the transport. I folded my rear seat down in my van and lined the back with that rubbery shelf liner. No I didn't come up with this on my own, I read it on CakeCentral ofcourse! I placed the cake and all my little boxes with my bow pieces and numbers and had a friend drive while I sat in back ready to catch anything that might fall over. To my utter amazement, nothing moved whatsoever. I can now confidently deliver my cakes alone. So here it is delivered and decked out in it's bows. I would do a few things differently with the bows in the future, but everyone loved the cake and were amazed that it tasted as good as it looked. Even one of the guys that worked in the nursery came in to tell me how fabulous it tasted. Made my night! He said, "My birthday is October 1st, the cake was amazing!" He may just get himself a cake for that!