I would love to make a 3-D skull cake but need some assistance. Does anyone have directions on how to make one. I see some lovely ones in the gallery but don't quite know where to start.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Lisa

Hey Lisa! My name is Lisa too LOL

Let's see... I am sure some 3-D experts can give you good advice but I'll start off with a few things i can think of:

1. carve your cake after stacking high and letting chill very hard in the refrigerator. Don't think of carving a room-temperature cake. Use a lot of thin layers of icing inbetween the layers.

2. carve first by tapering the tops and bottom into a rounder shape. Keep a small skull on hand to study the shapes. After you carve the main shape of the skull, taper a bit in the back and leave a bit of forehead in the front, like a real human. Again, refer to a small toy or sample. Keep refrigerating when carving if the cake gets warm. Be gentle with your serrated knife.

3. Carve eye sockets with the back of a spoon or something similar. Carve the nose hole and mouth holes the same way.

4. use a thin buttercream to cover the carved cake. Refrigerate again. Use a gentle hand.


5. When dry and cooled a bit, smooth down the BC with a fondant smoother or viva paper towels.

6. Roll out your bone-white fondant. Remember to make it at least 50% larger than a standard straight-edged cake. This thing has to drape into socket holes and downward so you will have to be aware of this.

7. Smooth fondant down over cake. Refrigerate again for a few minutes to set up if you like.

8. If you have an airbrush, use grey in gradually darkening colors to highlight the shadows. Keep the areas like the top of the head, the lightest where light would hit. You could even brush a tiny bit of pearly white on the areas that light would touch like the forehead or top.

Good luck! Lisa

WOW! Thanks Lisa, that will help alot.

Is there any more advice anyone could give me. It's going to be a small cake. I'd prefer to do it in buttercream instead of fondant if I can get away with it.

What size cakes would you bake?

Any step by step instructions for carving would be great too.

Sure thing! I am sure others will reply, but here are some more answers to your specific questions:

>Is there any more advice anyone could give me. It's going to be a small cake. I'd prefer to do it in buttercream instead of fondant if I can get away with it.

You could do it in buttercream but I don't think it will turn out that well. Buttercream is hard to get smooth looking especially with so many curves in a skull. Also real bone has sort of a smooth texture that would be hard to replicate in BC. If you are not-so-good with fondant, try buying some Satin Ice or make some MMF. Both should work well and look better than BC in my opinion.

>What size cakes would you bake?

Depends on how big you want this skull to be. If you are only feeding like 20 people, you could use 6" pans. I would use at least 3 6" pans, all split and filled. Go higher than you think you need to. When you carve, keep all the cake and icing away for cake balls for later.
Any step by step instructions for carving would be great too.

Lisa

I made a 3-d skull and used one side of the ball pan and placed that on a 6" round bottom and carved from that. I covered the whole cake in rolled buttercream which helped to keep the shape. The person who ordered it wanted the cake to ooze when it was cut, so after it was covered with rbc I piped in piping gel that was colored and patched the holes with more rbc. After that I took some paper towel dipped it in brown food coloring and colored the skull to look old and made teeth out of white chocolate. Hope this helps!

Okay, sorry but I'm getting very confused. If I did 6" cakes would you stack them up or lay them on their side to carve.

How would you carve the ball shape on top of a 6"?

I'm sorry but this one just has me stumped. Anyone have visuals that could help me out?

Hmm... I don't have a visual handy, but Ill see if I can help.

Idea #1 - The way I was thinking was taking 3 baked 6" cakes. Splitting each one into 2 pieces lengthwise (torting). Fill each layer with thin icing and stack them. You would have 6 thin cakes all stacked and iced together. Then let this refrigerate and settle. Carve your shape from there. First carve the edges off, then start carving the curves, etc...

Idea #2 from tthardy - Place a 6" cake on a board. Probably ice it underneath to hold it well. Place a half of a ball pan cake ontop of that. Ice it down to the 6" cake. Use this as a skull (sounds like)

Does this help?

That is correct, place the ball on top of the 6" carve and ice, then cover in RBC.