New here and hope to get/share some knowledge about the art of cake construction. I will post some pics of my cakes later on after work but for now I have a question I would like to throw out to the forum.

I have looked through some of the forum topics regarding guitars but have not found any that deal with the strings. I am making my daughter a Hanna Montana Guitar cake, not sure if it is going to be to scale or not but the part I am struggling with is the strings. I read in another post from All4cakes about using unbreakable gel for a string of pearls and other thin decoration ideas. They gave a link to the product but there was no pictures of it in action or how it worked.
I thought about sugar glass but seemed it dried to slow to get strings from it, also way to fragile.

Does anyone have any ideas?

I am what you would describe in the cake world a rookie, only been doing this 8 years now, but I can only afford to do a limited amount of cakes each year so my knowledge is still in it's infancy. I keep trying to push the envelope to get the best result.
Being a welder I work with tight tolerances and intricate details.
Here is a pic of one of my cakes just so you can get an idea of my skill level, I enjoy constructing high end, realistic, themed cakes.

I have seen Mike from Mike's Amazing cakes, using spaghetti not cooked. he just stick them in a piece of Styrofoam and then paint them with the airbrush or hand painted if you are using powder colors mixed with lemon extract. let them dry and the use them. Hope this help

I used silver thread (not edible, but is realistic looking) for this guitar cake I made



unbreakable gel is sold through global sugar art and other places.

basically you pipe it but it's flexible and well...unbreakable.

Here is a photo from a fellow cc'er who used it for tinkerbell's wings!
http://cakecentral.com/modules.php?name=gallery&file=displayimage&pid=1153808

I used the guitar strings painted with silver lustre dust and vodka. They started out ok, but after about 10 minutes they curled up at the ends and were no longer straight. Don't know if I did something wrong or what, but I wasn't pleased with the result.

i've only made the one guitar cake (frankenstrat replica) and tried many different techniques. because my cake was to scale i opted for silver embroidery thread, it's not edible, but gave a realistic look that i was unable to duplicate. my pic is too big to post here but under my profile. good luck.

Hi there - awesome cake, by the way! I also like to make things look as realistic as possible. And I'm a stickler for making my cakes all edible (as much as possible anyway). I ended up using my extruder (mixing a 50/50 gumpaste and fondant ) on my first set of strings and they broke. I did them too far in advance.

Then I did a 2nd set out of just fondant the morning before I delivered the cake and they were PERFECT! They could wrap around the tuner keys without breaking/straining. I used grey fondant and then dry dusted with silver lustre dust. This guitar took me forever! It's in my photos. Sorry, but I can't attach, as I lost my photos on my hard drive! HTH!

OK well I finished the cake and it was a hit! No cake disasters or near misses my frame performed great.

I designed the cake to be vertical and to be to scale. This was a Hannah Montana Guitar cake so there is a bit of a cartoony look to it and all my daughter friends are experts in the details so I tried to get it just perfect but at 2 in the morning some sacrifices needed to be made.
All in all is came out just as I had planned. I wanted it to be realistic and not a replica so I opted for a single layer, because two was just too thick. The overall dimensions were 40" x 13", a friend of mine had a Fender Stratocaster that I took measurements off and traced for the support. I used 1/8 acrylic as the sub frame and stacked the cake on that. I built it in the flat position and stood it up for the party.

This photo is from my camera phone so it is a little blurry. I will load a better one in my album latter.

awesome job!! blew me away! i wouldn't have thought to use an acrylic base...i'm curious though, how did you stop the cake from slidding off it when it was stood on end? cakewelder-you rock!!

It is kind of difficult to see from the pic of the acrylic base but there are shelves every 9" to lock the cake in place.

Here it is at 2 am w/o all the decorations on it just so you can see the thickness of the finished product. Even though it was only 1 layer thick, the MMF made it super sweet and it yielded about 40 pieces @ 2.5 inches square and everybody was happy. I marbled the fondant to give the appearance of wood and the varying color of Hannah's guitar.