Every so often I like to clear out the camera’s storage card so that we can continue taking pictures of our specialty cakes issue-free. As I was doing that, I’m thinking to myself, we have some great shots of the Napoleon cake–in particular, shots of us putting the surprise birthday cake together. Here’s a shot of Mr. Bonaparte with his face perhaps 50% finished…beside the final cake.
We received a request for a Batmobile cake and were thrilled to learn that the client wanted a cake of the latest one–the Tumbler.
That was, until we got a closer look at what exactly the Tumbler looks like! Of course we love a challenge, and we realized this was not going to be an ordinary car cake. We settled on a design that incorporated both fondant and gum-paste to recreate the numerous panels of armor. We also decided that since this was a birthday cake for a five-year old, we would wrap the car in yellow/orange windows. An all black cake comes out pretty boring anyway, and a lot of the detail tends to disappear.
So how did we do?? We sure love the result!
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We took some action shots of the work. The first image below shows how we started–with essentially sheet cakes that are eventually carved into the shape that’s needed, as you can see in the second image. The third image shows how we cover the final shape with fondant. There was a lot more work involved, of course!
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The client Vanessa wrote a lovely blog-post about the cake so we thought we’d link to her:
If anyone was curious as to exactly how we transported the cake with the sugar flowers already in place without breaking, as mentioned here on 11/2, here’s a useful shot.
I came across the shot as I was clearing out the camera storage and thought it was great. My preference would be to assemble a cake with sugar on flowers on site, especially if there are many flowers next to each other and there is a risk that they will bump into each other. This is especially a factor when the flowers are on long stems, and not stuck to the cake directly. Well, here you can see we covered the entire bouquet with plastic wrap, and filled in some of the voids with some crumpled plastic wrap. Solved most of the problem.
This cake was made for a dear friend of the family. It was a graduation cake for their daughter who started at Yale University this September. What can we say other than Congratulations!
We thought you guys might enjoy a look into how exactly something like this was done. How can that be made out of cake?? Well, with a heck of a good support system. We used a combination of PVC piping and MDF. I believe half of the budget was spent on getting the armature correct because if you don’t get it right in the beginning, you’ll never be able to fix it. And not did the cake have to stand, it also had to withstand the car-ride from our store in Levittown to Muttontown, Long Island. Let me tell you I certainly wasn’t as confident as the bulldog looked, but the cake’s structure was definitely strong, and I guess I didn’t have anything to worry about.
We loved the cake so much that we decided to recreate the as a display cake to keep in our store. We also have an upcoming fundraiser event for the Long Island Harvest on October 28th, so we thought we’d love it if Yale Mascot #2 could be done by then. We’ll probably cover the cake in modelling chocolate this time instead of buttercream, but I’m not sure yet. They both have their pros and cons, but modelling chocolate by far has the most potential. Now that I think about it, we haven’t really ruled out fondant for the cake yet either so… who knows! Check out the blog as we should have pics of the new version up within a week or two.