Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) I spent only 3 days in the production kitchen this week due to my mid week flight back home. I was lucky enough to get some fun cakes to work on this week including my very first tiffany box, a special cake designed for a women who loved gerbera's, the colour orange and red wine, another shooting stars cake with a figurine of wonder woman standing on top and a giant size chocolate bar.
Each cake had its own little challenge, but the most time consuming by far was creating the colourful gerberas that topped the bright orange square for Mandy's birthday cake. Those fiddly little petals almost got the better of me as the clock ticked closer to 7pm and into my 11th hour in the kitchen on Tuesday night, but what could I do? The flowers needed to be made and given time to dry before the cake assembly the next day! In the end I think the flowers turned out great and even though they were very hard to place onto the cake due to their very flat shape, I do think I achieved a good result.
My favorite cake this week was the giant size chocolate bar which was made with chocolate mud cake layered with chocolate ganache and topped with chocolate fondant...what more is there to say about that but YUM YUM YUM! The shape itself was quite straight forward to achieve. I started with a 7" square that was cut in half and sandwiched next to each other. Next was to ganache the whole cake and let it set. Once that was done I needed to measure up the cake and cut lines into the cake to form the chocolate blocks. Once cut, I let the cake set again before covering with fondant. And with thanks to Neoko for letting me borrow her really cool little wooden tool to help me smooth the fondant around the little chocolate blocks to make them look "chocolate shaped", the whole thing was coming together nicely.
Next I needed to paint the bottom inch of the cake in silver to make it look like foil. And then onto the DEI. Simple right? Well, not so simple really. For someone who doesn't know the first thing about Photoshop it took me a little while to set the DEI up to the right shape... but we did get there in the end thanks to some ego boosting from Emma - Thanks for that Em!
Once the DEI was ready I just needed to roll out some really thin fondant for the DEI to be stuck onto and then wrap around the cake. I tore off the top of the DEI to make it look like a torn wrapper. For the foil looking bits at the top of the cake I rolled out some really thin pieces of fondant through the pasta machine, ripped the edges, painted in silver and shoved them in!
I think the finished cakes looks pretty effective and will go down as one of my fave's.
Shell's Weekly tip - OPT FOR AIRBRUSHING
One of the reason I was having so much trouble with my gerberas was that the intensity and quantity of colour in my petal paste made it so soft that it was getting stuck to an in the petal cutters. I struggled through to make my flowers, but in hindsight I should have opted for less colour in my paste and then some airbrushing to achieve the colour intensity after. A lesson well learned for me so I though I should share!
I'm back in the kitchen on Tuesday and a bit unsure of what the week may bring... I heard down the grape one it's going to be HUGE!
Happy caking!
Shell.
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