Hummingbird Disaster

My Grandmother's birthday was this weekend, sadly, the hummingbird started out fairly doomed.
The colouring ended up far more like a parrot, the beak wouldn't stay on, the gum paste cracked every chance it got, and the whole bird had an unnatural sheen to it - because of the many repairs of the cracking.
So in a way - once I got it to the location, and had it ready to put on the cake - when I found that it had broken in half - I wasn't terribly sad.






So the cake was finished without the bird - a good thing.
Although, I'm rather displeased with the end result, I suppose I should be proud at my skill level, and with the amount of experience I have.



And since people have been asking how much time I spend on this stuff - overall, this cake took me - including the 10 hours of work on the hummingbird - probably 20 hours from the making of the cakes and frostings, the flowers, and then the overall decoration. Some of that mindless tv watching time as I created flowers.

Sugar sugar baby

Today was a day of sugar happiness. Brandy came over to play and we tested out blowing sugar with a copper pipe - it was fun and educational!
It's late and I am tired, I will leave you with some photos of the progress with the cake and wish you sweet dreams.

badum!

Check it out. Today, I made a practice humming bird. I spent the rest of the week making fondant and cakes and such - so today was just an assembly.

I started with the wings, a layer of fondant over the wire frame, and then many many feathers of various sizes to cover the top and bottom.

I recently purchased a Roul'Pat mat, and am loving it. It took a while to find the largest size possible at the cheapest price (some places sell it for 60 bucks!) - this mat combined with the rolling pin I use = no stick fondant! faboo fer sure.
The feathers were cut out again using my trusty leaf-shaped fondant cutters.

I didn't really want to do more than one wing, once I knew I could do it, but I needed to make both so that the wing apparatus would be balanced. This was very important, considering that the weight of the wings ended up being, I'm guessing, a little over two pounds.

Next was rather easy - I had shaved down the shape of the pound cake and the rice crispy head, and then attached the head with a dowel through it and the body.
I'd never lain fondant on a cake without butter cream, but now I totally understand why it's done - it really does give the fondant something to stick to - otherwise it ends up like a sort of lose sack over the cake, which is what happened with the bird's body.


I am hoping in the end for the bird to "fly" by resting atop these three upturned glasses - I balanced this and worried about it staying long enough to take photos - so I really need to figure out some sort of support for the whole cake, as well as the wings, since they are so very weighty. I'm thinking that the tail will be a part of this support, but haven't figured it out yet.

I also have some fabulous ideas for flowers, and know what I'm going to do with the sugar shapes I made earlier this week.

I need a blowtorch.

Garden?

Now that I've caught this thing up with all of what I have done, I can post at a more realistic pace - more details on the trial and error, less lengthly babbly posts where I try to explain too much.

Grandma's birthday is coming up. 80, and she's throwing a big 'ol bash for the occasion. I believe the expected count is around 30. And I've thrown my hat in to make a cake - this makes me very nervous, and I haven't *officially* said I'd do it yet, since so many people will be there, and I want to be happy with what I end up brining. So.. I'm practicing the grand idea I've come up with.

Oh, by the way - if your name is "Grandma" and you happen to be my Grandma - and you want the final cake to be a surprise, you should stop visiting this blog until your birthday!
Otherwise, read on!












A humming bird visiting a flower - or flowers, on top of a large cake.
Here I shall include an artist's rendition, care of MS Paint.

Quite fabulous, don't you think? Yes, I have mad skills.

How to do this, you may ask? Ah, well first, to start with the bird! I baked a duck shaped pound cake* last night (2 batches = one duck), and then proceeded to chop it up and reassemble it to vaguely look like a hummingbird.


I am quite pleased with the results.

I then spent some painful** tv-watching time cutting and bending coat hangers and mesh baskets from the dollar store to produce a frame*** for the wings. I plan on this being the support for the fondant - as there's no way it can support itself in such a large format without help.

Now to make a frame for the tail, and figure out some support for the head (it fell off after sitting upright for a little while. oops!)



*Sour Cream Pound Cake - The New Better Homes and Gardens Cook Book

1/2 c. butter
3 eggs
1/2 c. dairy sour cream (i used plain yogurt)
1 1/2 c. all purpose flour
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1/8 tsp. baking soda
1 c. sugar
1/2 tsp. vanilla

• Allow butter, eggs and sour cream to stand at room temp for 30 min. Grease and flour cake pan (makes standard loaf pan). Stir together flour, baking soda, baking powder. Set aside.


• In mixing bowl beat butter high speed for 30 seconds. Add sugar - beat for 10 mins or until quite fluffy. Beat in vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, beating 1 minute after each addition. Alternatly add flour and sour cream beating until just combined.


• Pour into pan. bake at 325 for about an hour.

**No, really, painful. I have little cuts all over my hands :(
***"But they aren't allowed to do such things in the cake contests! A non-edible frame is cheating!" you say? Yeah, well get over it. It'll be totally sweetawesome when I'm done with it.

Second Cake - Happy Birthday Des!

Somehow, the second time I did this cake, so many lessons had been learned that I pulled off something that impressed even me.

I'll take you through the process..

The birthday party was on Saturday.
Wednesday:
I made a batch of Marshmallow Fondant, and a batch of butter creme frosting.
Thursday:
I baked the duck with pound cake - and a sheet cake with a white cake mix. I also started to play with the fondant, making a water lily and some lily pads. I coloured the fondant by kneading in gel food colours (available at your local Upermarket - it adds less moisture than traditional food colouring). While the lily pads were freehand, the flour was reliant on some great fondant cutters.




The white powder you see all over is corn starch to assist in the stickiness of the fondant (I found in later attempts that this was due to way too much Crisco). I stored these in the fridge after completion.

Friday:

I started the major assembling....

First, I frosted the duck (made the day before so that it would be cooled entirely to room temperature) with a layer of butter creme frosting. This is to help the fondant stick to the cake. They say you should frost and let it sit for a while before laying the fondant to help with he sticking.. so I then coloured the fondant by kneading in some yellow food colouring. And then rolled it out to a massive sheet. Lifting the fondant sheet was not easy, even if i rolled it back on itself - it had a tendency to crack (the recipe on the baking 101 site says cracking means it needs more moisture - I added more Crisco.. this ended up being part of my problem, I used *way too much* Crisco, so the integrity of the fondant was lessened, it was too soft) - anyway. where was I? I placed the fondant over the duck and started to push, prod and mold it into shape. After much work, I got to a point where I was happy with it. I then molded and attached wings and feathers (again, the leaf fondant cutters, perfect shape!). Fondant is cool in that if you need it to stick to itself, just wet it!

Now for finishing touches - some sprayed on colour accents, thanks to my husband, and some black eyes, and we have a duck!
Now for the sheet cake - very carefully, I leveled the top with a serrated knife. I then cut it in half, for filling. On each inside of the halves I spread a very thin layer of butter cream - this was so that the filling wouldn't seep into the cake and make it all mushy. I then spread blueberry pie filling onto one side, and put the other side back on top.

Next came frosting - but first, you'll notice round rise in the cake - that is a plastic cake board, to support the duck later. I used a white store bought Betty Crocker frosting that I had dyed a bright blue. Then, I started placing green fondant cut-outs of - yes, the leaves again all around the edge.

Finishing up - add the flour and lily pad.. some spray colour accents...
Place the bird over the cake board anddd....

tada!

First Cake - the Lumpy Duck

My mommy said that my last cake was the kind of thing you needed a blog for. So - hey.. here is a blog.
I recently started to play with cake decoration - and since starting, have been totally hooked. It's only been 3 months now, but I've spent so much time and money already... Anyway.. the next few posts will be about cakes I've done already, and how. Just to catch things up.. and then I'll use this place to muse, post projects etc etc....





This is the first "creative" cake I have ever made. It was a test cake for my daughter's first birthday - to see if I could do such a thing as make a fancy pants cake like those on Ace of Cakes.

As you can see, the results were.. questionable.















This was the first cake made in the duck mold (one big mold you fill half full and cook) I used a carrot cake mix, and it did not at all finish cooking in the middle.














The next time, I baked the duck with a pound cake mix - much more sturdy, and it cooked much better. However, much of my problems ended up being with me learning how to work with and make the marshmallow fondant recipe that I had found online (fabulous site, learned a lot here). I used *way* too much Crisco, and it was slippery and shiny - also the fondant cracked like crazy when I placed it on the cake - so i smoothed it out with a wet finger, and that made the texture really slick.



For some reason, I thought that the aerosol food colouring (Micheal's and my local Upermarket carry this) would soften the shine - sadly, it just made things far, far worse.

I took this cake to work to be consumed. It was a very tasty pound cake.