so if you saw my other posts, sorry for so many lol, scratch the other q's, i've decided to go for a preggo belly cake and a disney car cake sculpted HOPEFULLY i can pull it off. if not it may be a quick trip to the bakery lol. so my q is..

1) on the preggo belly, what do i use for the belly part? i have the wilton ball pans for the boobs. i have a metal mixing bowl that may be big enough but it's pretty old and banged up a little so it's not going to be super smooth. will that still work? what do you use?

2) on the car cake, how big can i make it without it being too big that the details don't look as good if that makes sense?

and

3) do you torte and fill your carved cakes? or is it easier to leave them as whole as possible? i want a smooth finish esp for the belly cake. as far as serving/eating goes, when i do carved cakes it seems the less icing i use under the fondant, the smoother it looks so when i serve it, it may not have much icing ykwim. not many people like cake without icing. what do you do?

the only question I can answer is the last one. I don't do belly cakes (can't see myself hacking into it like a C=section), HATE doing car cakes (just too much of a perfectionist and I end up hating my work) but I DO torte my carved cakes...BUT I only use stiff buttercream as a filling. Just torte the cake before carving (you can wrap it back up and freeze it again to get it nice and solid before you start carving) and then it won't give you issues.

HTH,
Cat

I've never torted my carved/sculpted cakes, and I've never had anyone complain about having a higher ratio of cake to frosting. But then, I almost never cover the cake with fondant so there's always plenty of frosting on top. I think whether and how you torte really depends on the construction of the cake -- seems like it would be simple enough with the belly cake, and for the car, there's also an obvious place to fill, where the smaller upper cab part (the roof and windows) meets the larger lower body of the car. But yeah, definitely freeze before carving.

On the size of the car, I'd say just do whatever size you need for the # of servings. It'll look fine. I did a race car that ended up being about 8x15 at the base IIRC (baked a 10x15 and cut a strip off the side to get the narrower car proportions) and I thought it looked good, though I wasn't trying to be too detailed.