Someone is getting married and they wanted a barbie cake. How cute is that? Remember when making a barbie cake that the cake needs to be altered in the same way a dress does. Most brides do not have a dress that is squared off at the top like this one is. This dress should have been tapered a bit so it wouldn’t look so square.
Someone has some big shoes to fill! LOL… The only thing I see wrong with this cake is that the straps for the sandals are flat on the cake. If everything else is 3D why aren’t they?
This is an interesting idea and when exectuted correctly it could be beautiful. The chocolate pieces should have been placed closer together to look more like stained glass. Maybe even the color of the icing should have been different to give the cake a more dramatic effect.
Oh, how I hate stripped bows. There is always a a line that is not completely straight. I suggest taping the gum paste so the black line goes on perfectly straight and than removing the tape once the food coloring is dry. I would also measure out your cake so that your swag is the same distance all the way around the cake. They even sell a tool that will measure the swag out for you. Also be careful of placing borders on the top edge of your cake, you want to make sure that it is even all the way around. Remember you are better off going a little slower so you get a better end product!
I’m always amazed at some of the things people order. For instance, this cake how much nicer would it have looked if the yellow and gray colors from the bow were on the black icing? I mean there are flowers on the cake. The customer could of had just the centers of the flowers gray and yellow and it would have brought the whole cake together nicely without taking away from them wanting an entirely black cake.
With all of the cake shows currently on TV I wonder how this show has made it? Well at least with Duff being the main focus on the show. I watch pretty much every cake and challenge show but I never see Duff making a cake start to finish. I mean why doesn’t Duff ever make a cake or compete on these challenge shows? To be specific with the challenge shows, they can’t include Bigger, Badder, Fire Breathing Crap. Is it because most of his cakes are inedible or because his decorators have the talent that made him so successful? I think that if most decorators had weeks to make an inedible products and cover it with fondant it to would look cool. However what are artist for than? They are the ones that make inedible works of art and cake decorators make edible ones.
Did you ever eat icing that contained so much food coloring it tasted bitter? This is usually due to dark icing having so much food coloring in it. I have a solution though, instead of adding the color to white buttercream add it to chocolate buttercream. This will prevent that bitter taste that usually comes with adding a lot of food coloring. By starting off with chocolate you have a nice flavor and a dark color, therefore you will need less color so less bitterness. Just remember to tell your customers you are now using chocolate icing just in case they have any chocolate allergies!
The fondant looks very nice. I would not have added brown flowers though. In my opinion they look dead. I would have added a colored flower to compliment the cake.
I must say this icing is one of the best things I have ever made! I’m not a huge fan of buying store bought icing because I personally do not like the taste. However, I gave in the other day when I did not want to make my own cream cheese icing. Not to my surprise, I opened the container and did not like the taste so much that I did not want to use it on my cake. So I though maybe if I combined it with the dark chocolate ganache I made it would be better; well it was. I add about 60% ganache and 40% cream cheese icing and blended. When I finished blending the icing, I wanted to eat it by the spoonful. Needless to say everyone who ate the cake agreed and this icing is going on the menu permanently!
Chocolate ganache is very easy to make. It is equal parts chocolate and heavy cream. To make ganache you must first heat the heavy cream. Once your creamstarts to boil add in your chocolate and stir it until it fully melts. That’s it!
Coloring icing is very easy to do with all of the food safe colors on the market today. There is basically every color you can imagine available in food dye. However it would be costly to buy all of them for the possibly of using them one day. I recommend buying the colors you need now and than mixing 2 or more colors to get the ones you do not have when you need them. Color mixing can be difficult to do, so I would start with mixing a small amount of color at a time. This way you will gradually see if you are achieving the color you need.
There are many different techniques out there from the paper towel method to a knife in hot water. Why do you want to add paper or water to your icing? The trick is to start off with a nice smooth soft buttercream in the container. Once you have this, smoothing out a cake will just take practice. Now I’m not knocking the people who use paper towels to smooth buttercream. The fact is the buttercream I use does not crust. So if I put a paper towel on top of my cake and tried to smooth it, I would either pull off all the icing or I would have to pull paper towel out of my cake. Now if I dipped a knife into hot water each time I had to ice a cake I would have water everywhere including all over my cake. Now that’s not to say I don’t use hot water I do, but just to heat up my spatula to smooth out small flaws in my cake. For example if I wrote on a cake and the name is spelt wrong, instead of scraping the whole cake I would just take off the name re-ice the area and smooth it with my hot spatula. Everyone can give tips on how to get perfectly smooth buttercream. If you want to learn how to ice a cake smooth you just need the right equipment and practice.
Here is another Phillies hat cake. See the difference with a smaller brim? It may be a bit to small but it looks better than being to big. Overall I think the cake underneath it compliments the hat and some how makes it look better. Check out my other Philadelphia Phillies cakes.
Isn’t the dot on top of the phillies cap blue? Hat cakes are difficult to make especially when they are not covered in fondant. It is kinda hard to hide the smoothing lines in this photo since there are no other detail than the P on the front. It is a shame that the brim on the hat wasn’t bent more to how the players are wearing them. If it was, we wouldn’t be able to notice that the brim is a bit to big.
How cute, a penguin cake! I think this cake is well done. The decorator maximized the cake at the bottom by adding what I believe is snow or ice. I would recommend highlighting the snow with some airbrush color (either gray or blue) to add some definition to they cake. That way the penguins white belly would be more defined from the snow.