Tennis Cake-- Ace! :)

Ha ha! I am so funny! I am also very late in getting pictures/explanations of my latest cake logged. Oh well, life has been too busy lately.
It all started with the racquet. My friend, Jill, asked me to make a cake for her son, Taylor's, 15th birthday. He is #1 on the Varsity tennis team so she asked for a chocolate cake with a tennis theme. It was a challenge for me, I've never made a "boy" cake before! So I turned to CakeCentral and searched the gallery for tennis cakes. Pretty slim pickings!! I did find one rectangular cake with the court on top and a 3D tennis racquet and balls on top. I liked it, so I found out he plays with a Prince Diablo racquet and decided to make a miniature racquet for his cake. I made two racquets out of fondant 2 weeks prior to the birthday, but the never dried!! So I made two more out of gumpaste and they wouldn't dry either!! I was panicking big time! The night before they still weren't dry, so I had a fan blowing on them and I used the cool setting on my blow dryer and desperately tried to get them to dry. They didn't!
I painted it and left it to dry as long as possible. I ended up piping royal icing on the back of the racquet to give it support. Here it is all finished. Can you see that I broke part of the handle and had to glue it back on in this photo? Well I did! :)


While things were drying I made the cake, torted, crumb coated, frosted and covered in chocolate fondant. I then cut different size circles etc out of different shades of chocolate fondant to go on the sides and the top of the cake. I also made the gumpaste tennis balls and bent the wires into spiral shapes. Here is a picture of the cake with the fondant details:
I then piped "Happy Birthday Taylor" on the side of the cake with black royal icing. I think it turned out nicely. I have a little trick for getting "nice" writing. I find a font and size I want on the computer, print it up and then transfer it to the cake by holding the print out up to the cake and poking through the letters with a pin. Clever huh?

The next step was to put on the racquet and the balls. I warmed the wire with a candle before putting a ball on, worked like a dream! I just poked the racquet in the cake with the wire I had inserted before it had dried. I used a little glob of royal icing to keep the ball in place.
I couldn't decide if I should put everything on before or after delivery, but went with before because I knew I was just driving down the street and I HAD to get pictures! So here is the totally finished product:

They really liked it and they also thought it tasted as good as it looked. That always means a lot to me, it has to taste good!

I thought I would also include a picture of what happened to one of the last racquets I was trying to dry on a drying rack on the table. I should know better than to leave anything below a 10' height!!


For easter we made Bunny Cakes. We made on larger bunny (6" cake cut in half) and then we made mini bunnies that we gave to Grandma and Grandpa and our Bishop. I unfortunately did not get pictures of those, but they turned out really cute. Didn't Julia do a great job? She gave him green eyes like her mommy! :)