I found the inspiration for this cake design from a clay sculptor named Scott Rogers. I seen the image and instantly thought….C-A-K-E! Granted his sculpture sat on a table and the spewing oil nearly reached the top of a standard doorway….fantastic but, nonetheless, I can only take modeling chocolate so far! The other issue that I had with this cake was fitting it into the refrigerator. I have two in my home, for the purposes of cakes, and still had to remove 3” from the top of the spewing oil just so that it would fit….rookie mistake on my part but…HA! I got it! So, there is a ½” pvc pipe that runs the length of the oil. To create more support for the bulkier parts of the oil I drilled a hole into the pipe, sanitized the pipe and added cookie sticks; which were taped into place with floral tape. All of this was then covered in plastic wrap before I started sculpting the modeling chocolate around it. I wanted the oil to be shiny so I didn’t mix the color into the chocolate; rather, I painted it with an oil based food coloring. After everything was said and done I found that the refrigeration caused the sheen to fall flat. So, I won’t do that again. The derrick, platform, truck, pipes and barrels are all hand sculpted pieces from gumpaste and then I painted them with a mixture of vodka and copper luster dust. The derrick was created using a template of an image in four parts. Once the cake was on my board, filled and iced I placed the platform (I had cut a hole into the center of it) over the center of the flush mount and male pvc adapter. Then, ever so gently, added the spewing oil and finished sculpting it out. To finish, I placed the four pieces I created for the derrick walls and attached them with gum glue. To finish out my seams I added more gumpaste to each corner and painted it with copper luster dust. When I found out that the groom only liked German Chocolate cake I instantly knew that I was going to use a chocolate ganache versus a chocolate buttercream. Turns out that the ganache creates a far richer flavor to my German Chocolate cake recipe and I plan on keeping it that way from this point forward. I will share this recipe with you all in a couple of weeks. The groom had no idea about his groom’s cake and he was pleasantly surprised when it was delivered! #oilderrick #cake #groomscake #chocolate #germanchocolate #modelingchocolate #spewingoil #sculpting