Rock n' Roll Guitar Cake

I love the design of this cake. My little niece asked for a chocolate cake and a pink guitar standing up and her mom asked for a small, 6" cake and she would bake the cupcakes.

Here are some pictures I used for inspiration: Rock and Roll and girly, lots of pink and black, a guitar with some swirls of hearts and butterflies.  I also found these adorable cupcake toppers that I wanted to try replicating (check out, Cakes by Steph, she also made the cake in the picture).



I designed a template over Photoshop using all the cool brushes and fonts.



 I have not had much practice with piping aside from some writing and very little decorations over a cake. The guitars for the cupcakes were made using Wilton Color Flow Mix since I read it dries harder than with royal icing. The colors were all made the night before so the black could have a chance to mature completely – the black was more of a murky gray the day I made it but turned perfectly black by the time I needed to use it.

I printed out a template and taped some parchment paper over it on a cutting board. These little guys took me 3 hours to get done…30 guitars, 3 hours, not very efficient but what a learning experience! The 1st 2 hours alone was spent trying to get the right consistency. I tried to outline the guitars 1st then fill with a softer icing but it was so messy and looked just awful as you can see in the picture.

The ones on the left were outlined first then filled; the ones on the right were just filled in without an outline…so much better! I pitched the outline method and went straight to filling these in.

  

All the black, pink and light pink was done in one night and the white details added the following day...30 guitars for 30 cupcakes! Phew!

  

The cake was chocolate filled with chocolate mousse, coated in milk chocolate Ganache and then covered in hot pink marshmallow fondant. The background was painted with pink and red gel colors mixed with almond extract. I had made the black cutout decorations 2 days earlier.

A trick I learned while at a 3C’s meeting in January was to wrap the fondant cutouts and store in the freezer until you need them: The freezer keeps them soft and pliable. I pulled them out of the freezer and used them right away…they were perfectly soft and bendable like the day they were made and not hard at all….lovely tip! The photo here is of the cutouts sitting on parchment paper inside a freezer bag.  All the details was hand-cut (stars, 7, guitar, leaves), no Cricut here but it would have been so easy to have had a Cricut to make these. Silver dragees were added in the middle of the stars and to make out the name.

 

The guitar standing on the top was hand-cut out of marshmallow fondant mixed with Tylose (to help it dry harder). I don’t like using toothpicks in cakes and instead, use dry spaghetti as you can see here.

Kayla loved her cake and her big sister has already put in her request for her cake, baseball’s and bats - ideas are spinning in my head.



08/24/10 Update - The big sister changed her mind and wanted the Alice In Wonderland Eat Me Petits Fours...I surprised her with a Mad Hatter Hat Cake. 

Polka Dot Mod Monkey Cake

Such a cute and tiny cake: A 4" round with 6 cupcakes! I made this for my brothers friend whose son turned 1. I had to fix the "2nd" when they came by to pick up the cake and wasn't able to get a picture of it with the "1st" on there - yikes but alas, easily fixed! The cake was vanilla with fresh strawberries and Rich's Vanilla Bettercream (tastes a lot like the whipped cream Sam's and Costco uses...stable and delicious). The outside was covered in Bettercream and decorated in marshmallow fondant (MMF). I usually make fondant covered cakes and covering this one smoothly in Bettercream was a challenge. I may have spent about a half hour just trying to smooth it out perfectly but maybe it was because it was just so small (4") or maybe the Bettercream was too fluffy - not sure but it turned out pretty good. I made all the fondant decorations 3 days prior to allow for plenty of time to dry. I also brushed the backs of each piece with a little bit of white chocolate to help add a barrier between the "wet" bettercream and the "dry" fondant since they picked it up the day before the party and I was worried about the fondant softening up. I hope little Hayden enjoyed his FIRST birthday cake....it matched all the "Mod Monkey" party decorations perfectly.

Rich's Bettercream note:  Finding the Rich's products is difficult.  Here is a UK Rich's website with some good information about the cream itself.  Smart and Final carry the Chocolate version.  I was luck to have found the Vanilla at a Cake Supply store far away from me and I may have to make another trip out there soon to grab some more. 

Speed Racer Mach 5 Cake

I made this over a year ago and now, with the blog, I can share my experience with making the Mach 5. My son had his mind set on wanting the actual car as a cake for his 5th birthday. I was up for the challenge and already had made him a car the prior year. I learned so much from the 1st one but barely enough to conquer the Mach 5…I am so glad I talked him out of making the Mach 6 – “you’re going to be 5, we can do the 6 next year” (I couldn't even fathom how I was to pull that off).

Here is the only picture I have of the Car Cake made the prior year for his 4th birthday. My 1st carved cake and only my 3rd fondant cake. We had just bought a digital camera and I accidentally erased ALL the pictures of the entire cake process as well as of his birthday party…Ahhh! Lesson learned and now I am meticulously careful to not do that again! I got this one photo of the cake from grandpa! He was addicted to watching the Disney Car movie and wanted this particular yellow car. Although it’s a car, it bore no resemblance to the actual car in the movie…he loved it anyways. I added little details to it: The tires were Oreo cookies with black fondant wrapped around it. Around the front of each tire, I carved “happy birthday” into it. The license plate on the back had his birth date and I made an exhaust pipe stick out of the back and the hood’s banner read, “Sponsored by Andrew”. I even propped the cake up an inch. And yes, that is a cookie sheet that the cake is sitting on – I didn’t know any better (I have another cake where I used my bamboo cutting board wrapped in foil – ha-ha, I have learned a lot since).


Now, the Mach 5 - What a carving challenge! I made it out of pound cake since I was so worried about it holding up. I baked the cake the night prior, let it cool overnight, then the following day before I started working on it, I stuck into the freezer for 2 hours so that it would not break apart when I carved into it.

You can see the 1st step here. I took his little 3-inch toy car, scanned it into the computer, enlarged it, printed it and used it as a stencil over the 9x13 cake to carve out the outline (you can see the stencil sitting at the top of the photo).

Once I had the outline carved out, I removed the stencil and carved out all the rounded corners and features including the little dip for the car seats. I then outlined the cake over the parchment paper with an edible marker to use as a guide to cut the cake board that I later covered in foil.

I did such a great job with the buttercream – hah - LAL! Very sloppy but I was still learning. Once the cake was covered in buttercream, I rolled out the fondant and placed it over the car smoothing out all the features. The toughest part was getting the fondant around the pointed corners and into those deep crevices without ripping…ahhh, very frustrating!

Somehow, I was able to put a dent on the side and rather than fix it and make it worse, left it as is. I also had barely enough fondant to cover the wing in the back. I tried patching it up but it looked worse, so I just took the patch off and left that as is too…It bugged me to see that but I was already so frustrated at covering the car that I didn’t want to mess with it anymore than I needed to (thank goodness that cake was for me and not for someone else).

These are the tires. I rummaged through my pantry looking for something to use as tires and failed. I remembered Bakerella and her cake pops and decided to try it with tires instead. I mixed the left over pieces of cake off the carvings with buttercream, made a ½ inch thick cake with it and used a round cookie cutter to cut out the tires…it worked perfectly! I covered these up with black fondant leaving the back side exposed (it was going up against the cake and no one was going to see the back side).

I made both red coins with the 5 and white coins with the M to top off cupcakes since I didn’t have a clue as to how many servings the cake would end up serving. You can see the tires along the top of the photo drying upside down.

I was so frazzled with what I had gotten myself into that I asked my brother to help. He was so awesome, adding all the little details (he’s just as meticulous and me). He used a single, white sprinkle for the shift knob, added the seat seams, racing gages and even the steering wheel. For the windshield, I took the plastic window out of a toy box and cut out the windshield shape. After we stuck it into the cake, we realized the fondant was too soft and the windshield kept trying to straighten itself out so we just removed the windshield, set it aside and just waited to insert it in the following morning after the fondant had a chance to dry. As for the rims on the tires, I used the “i” from the Wilton alphabet cutters to stamp out a rim design then stamped an “A” in the middle for his name.


We propped the cake up on a little box wrapped up in the same foil as the board, placed the cake over it, and added the tires using some buttercream and toothpicks to help it stay put.


Tip: I have since learned to not use toothpicks in food involving kids. I now use dry spaghetti, even angel hair if I need it to be finer…Works like a charm! A trick I learned while reading about making Bento lunches for my picky lil’eater.

Finished the cake off by adding some lettering to the board and decorated the cupcakes. In the end, no one wanted to eat the car, they all went straight for the cupcakes instead saying that the cake looked too good to eat. And the kids, they just dove right into the cupcakes and took off to play. What is it with kids and cupcakes! I was very sad in the end since I had to be the one to actually throw it away…sayonara cake! Next time, I am NOT making any cupcakes. No excuse to not eat the cake, you just gotta eat the cake!