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Giant cupcake pan with base flipped. Tried to make bamboo walls with wide round tip but ended up roughing it up to look better. Roof and sills with wide basketweave tip. Saltine & brown sugar sand on piping gel base over foil. Pretzel rod palm trunks, forgot gumtex to stiffen fondant so fronds were brittle. Confectionery coating to stick things together.
The cake is lemon cream with lemon pie filling. The callas were done with a heart cutter. I did a different style of carnations that I like much better than Wilton. The daisies around the bottom would have been better without that border, but I didn't know it would happen so they're kind of hovering there, with the glue hopefully holding them. The decoration seems to be hiding the bulging filling nicely (no time to let it set!) I was quite pleased with how this one turned out.
This is more or less a practice cake. I despair of ever getting smooth BC. The pattern ended up being really busy, and I miscalculated where a couple of the designs ended up. I used leaf shaped cookie cutters to get more uniform shapes, but they tended to be too 'fat' for my liking. I tried using tip 301 for the outlines but it didn't work very well. The icing was thin enough to come out a 01S, so I have no idea why that didn't work. I do like some of the variations, though.
Cake hell - almost 6 hours to torte, stack & crumb coat. Forget smoothing! The lace is covering alligator skin and cracks. The decorating took a mere 2 hours, since the roses were done ahead. 6" top, 8" bottom. Doctored devil's food turned lighter. Overnight in the freezer made it nice and moist even after overbaking. The icing just did not want to participate - too soft. Not sure where this will go -- we're caked out.
They seemed to take forever. Working on this many at one time was difficult because the fondant kept going too hard. But they look pretty good. The candy cup step was a hassle and didn't really seem to do any good. The leaves were very difficult to shape -- the tool seems too blunt. Working with tissue-paper thin fondant can be a bit tricky.
I copied foxymomma521's technique for putting cake balls in miniature cones. Melted chocolate inside cone keeps it from getting soggy - I didn't add any oil at first so that was more laborious than needed. The tops were rolled balls after cone was filled; when warming up (fridge between steps) the tops tended to fall off while dipping. Cake was chocolate hazelnut -- choc, nutella, and hazelnut creamer. A tad too moist. Toppings worked pretty well. VERY TOP HEAVY & TIPPY.
Wilton fondant tastes awful, but is nice to work with as a beginner. The cake was covered well but it got very late so the rest is slapdash. No gumpaste added, so it took forever to get firm enough to hold its own. Very uneven, but it was enough to give the hang of it. The cake is chocolate, but a little dry and the cinnamon didn't really work well in it. It was enough to impress the coworkers. :-)
#2 cornelli practice in choc BC, #86 ruffle needs more practice, #16 rosettes at top of ruffle and side. Bottom border to use up the last of the icing. Cake: carrots added to spice mix -- way too moist to even trim. Baked in 9x13, cut in half and stacked -- did not cook around the flower nail! Icing: 1 stick butter, vanilla, 4c PS, 1 tsp cinnamon, liquid butter pecan flavor coffee creamer to soft texture -- DELICIOUS!! Crusted, but usual problem smoothing, crumbs. Practice cake sent with DH to wor
Fun pan. When using a pound cake the pan needs to be well over 3/4 full so it rises high enough. This was a little too shallow. The cake was solid enough to support the top. The icing just wouldn't stick to the cake (piped directly on with no crumb coat). Need a little more practice in getting the pressure/pace steady. Colors were good, nothing overwhelmed anything else. Needed a little more icing between top & bottom.
3 ovals made with cake extender, but cake mix bits refused to dissolve. Torted, total of 5 layers yellow with Nutella/BC mix filling, cocoa BC icing. Significant lean, but a skewer kept it from sliding too badly. #48 Basketweave ok, but arm was bad for #4B rope border. Somehow an extra vertical was marked so BW was off, therefore the flower cascade. Flowers were awful -- other student & I had melting RI that night so very poorly shaped. Very much a practice piece, though DH & coworkers raved.
In aluminum pan for transport to friend who needed a pick-me-up. Top iced flat, plaid marked at edges but freehanded so rather crooked, done with ribbed basketweave tip. More practice needed for reverse shells! BC mums piled on, with violet leaves. Need practice on that, too! Toothpick with a dab of BC on the tip is good for picking up dried icing flakes that fell from flowers & leaves from rest of cake. Deep orchid icing color based from Wilton Rose Pink with dab of violet.
There's enough icing on here that the topsy turvy isn't very clear, but this was just a quick cake since DH asked about having one, even though he'd already had one last week. Chocolate cake, used up class leftovers of chocolate and tinted icing. Piping the icing on with a narrow tooth star looked good, though a basketweave tip might have been better. Big rosettes looked like roses -- rather feminine, but fast.
Using a leaf tip to create palm fronds went quite well. The green was a nice mix of 2:1 moss green to juniper green. The rest was chocolate. The shells in the coconuts was a nice texture, but the lack of color contrast wasn't the greatest. I'll try yellow next time. I wasn't as fond of stars for the trunk. Maybe next time I'll use a basketweave tip or something like that instead. I also prefer using a textured tip on the sides rather than smooth.
I used tips to ice a 'bald head' and 'beard' along the sides, which looked quite good. The size 12 round tip for the glasses was perfect. The size 16 extended star to make hair worked very well. If anything, making some of the 'locks' shorter would have looked better, and making some end halfway down the edge worked extremely well. Hair color was not good. Chocolate was too dark to start; white would have been better. Carving would also improve it.
I used a container to imprint a circle. Other than that, it was all freehand. Not perfect by any means, but not bad for just starting. Tinting the deep colors was an experiment. It worked well to have the icing pretty runny, especially for filling in the red after the outlines were done. The large red stars were pretty scary looking. Even more scary, it was on a red velvet cake! It was just to send to work as a snack, nothing special.
Nothing special, just an alternative to the rainbow cake. I used a former work logo on a single layer round and used stars to fill in the line drawing. Crumb coating is still impossible, and the icing refused to crust for everyone in the class. The border looked better before the husband tipped it on its side while helping me unload the car.
Talk about a learning experience. Torting a 2" cake into 3 layers? Bad idea, especially when slightly crooked. Lowest dam too close to edge, sprang leaks when stacked. Finally removed lowest layer altogether. Finally hid crumbs under plenty of icing, which completely hid contours of the petal pan shape. All of this took 4 hours, THEN piping started. Not a good idea, late at night and when frustrated. I didn't bother to fix the many mistakes. Fairly good tasting, appreciated by family, but not pretty.
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