Russian Cargo Threadcake

In our now second annual tradition, my wife and I made another Threadcake.  Threadcakes is an awesome online competition where you make a cake based on a shirt by Threadless.  Last year we made a walrus and ice cream truck cake and I wrote about it here.

This year’s cake is based on the shirt “Russian Cargo.”  It’s inspired by Tetris.  The Cyrillic text on the side of the cargo ship is the first name of the creator of Tetris, Alexey Pajitnov.

Unlike last years entry, this year we made the entire piece out of nothing but cake, fondant, and gum paste.  There are also a few pieces of structural support where necessary, such as the crane arm, the wire to hold the floating Tetris piece, support in the Tetris piece itself, and some wooden dowels.

The cake is again made out of vanilla chiffon cake from Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft from the Culinary Institute of America. This cake is rather firm, which makes it easier to carve and stack, but still moist and tasty.  The frosting is a simple vanilla buttercream frosting.

Here is the mise en place for the cake itself.

All the dry ingredients get sifted together.  I actually sifted this year rather than just mixing them as I normally would.  I’m not sure it made a difference since the batter gets mixed so much anyway.

Here are all the eggs yolks required to make this cake.  This is enough for one half-sheet cake (13x18”).  I ended up needing two half-sheet cakes to make this cake.

And here are the egg whites separated out and saved for later.

The wet ingredients all get mixed together.

The wet ingredients get slowly mixed into the dry.

It all gets mixed for a few minute and everything is smooth and well incorporated.

The egg whites get turned into a meringue.

The meringue then gets gently folded into the cake batter.

A half-sheet pan is prepared by lining it with some parchment paper and then coating it with a flour and oil spray.

The batter goes into the pan and then immediately into the oven.

After baking for about 40-50 minutes, the cake is done.

Then, after cooling for a few minutes in the pan, the cake is turned out onto a wire rack and allowed to cool completely.

The cake recipe ends up with extra egg whites.  We turned them into a slightly over mixed meringue to make clouds.  Over mixing them gave it a more uneven and “cloudy” texture.

Here are the clouds after drying in the oven for a while.  Unfortunately we forgot to attach them to the smoke stack on the ship.

Now it was time to make the buttercream frosting.  It was a simple mixture of butter, milk, and powdered sugar.  While not my favorite frosting, it does make excellent frosting for carved cakes.  It also takes substantially less time than a “real” buttercream frosting.

Here is the completed frosting.  We ended up needing about twice this amount to ice and fill the whole cake.

Next up was stacking and carving the cake.  Each cake was cut to just about the right size, then the rounded top was removed with a sharp bread knife.

Frosting was then added to the top of the pieces.

And another piece was laid upside down on top.  The second piece is upside down so that the top can be perfectly flat.  The bottom of the cake is always going to be flatter than anything you can carve.

Here is a three piece high stack.

And here is all the cake stacked for all pieces of the ship and cargo.

The hanging tetris piece would never last as just cake.  It needed some structural support.  For that support a one inch wide strip of aluminum was bent and cut into shape.

The shape was then filled with cake.

All the cake pieces then needed carving.  Cereal boxes make for excellent impromptu guides to make sure that you carve perfectly vertically.

Here is a carved piece that will end up being one of the two Tetris cargos on the ship.

The form of the cargo ship itself also gets carved.

All the pieces then need to be iced.  The icing here shouldn’t be very thick.  It is basically just there to allow the fondant to adhere to the cake.

The ship itself also gets iced.

The ship, then, needed to have a hole carved out of the rear section.

This was to allow us to put a block of baked Sculpy to serve as an anchor for the crane arm.  Without this, the crane arm wouldn’t have been able to support the weight and would have fell over.

The hole was covered up with cake and re-iced.  A wooden skewer marks the point where the crane arm will anchor.

Everything then goes into the fridge so that the icing can harden up a bit to make it easier to cover with fondant.

Then we hade to make all the colors of the fondant we needed, except black.  It’s really hard to make a good black color at home without making the fondant too liquid.  Instead, we just purchased a small amount of black fondant.

You can wear gloves to mix the gel color into the fondant if you are worried about dying your hands.

The Tetris square were cut out using a clean Exacto knife.

This made for perfect and uniform squares.

The squares were laid out to dry over night.

The lettering for the ship name also was cut out of fondant.

The next day, each of the cake pieces was covered with white fondant to form a base.

Then the Tetris squares were adhered to the piece with just a light brushing of water.

Here is the completed smaller Tetris cargo.

And the larger Tetris cargo.

This is the front tower of the ship with the smoke stack in front.  Unfortunately we ended up having to cut this piece in half.  We had planned to make a larger cargo ship, but shrank the ship since we ran out of cake.  So, to get everything to fit on the ship, this piece made the ultimate sacrifice and was cut in half.

The ship also got covered with fondant.  The crane is also coming together here as is the lettering on the side of the ship.

And here is the completed cake.  The crane arm is a metal rod to help support the weight.  The Tetris piece is suspended with some wire.

 

Here is the cake again at a different angle.

This is some of the aftermath of eating the cake.  It was a fun cake to make, but we’re certainly glad to not have had to eat it all ourselves.  It was taken over to a friends house to share and then to work with me where it was finally finished.

Road Block Threadcake

A few weeks ago I learned of the Threadcakes contest from Threadless.  It definitely sounded like something that I should participate in, so my wife and I set about planning.  Having only made one carved and fondant cake prior to this cake (an armadillo grooms cake), we had no doubt that we’d get anywhere near to winning. 

The competition basically is to create a cake based upon one of the shirts that Threadless sells.  We decided upon the Road Block shirt.  It wasn’t so detailed that it would take forever to create or be hard to cover with fondant, but was interesting enough to make a good cake.  If you want to skip to the entry page at Threadcakes you can go directly there.

For the cake we used the chiffon cake recipe from the Culinary Institute of America’s Baking and Pastry: Mastering the Art and Craft.  We used a store bought fondant for covering as well as store bought pre-mixed gum paste. We used a simple vanilla butter cream frosting rather than the more complicated icing I’d normally use.

Here is the mise en place for the cake.

The wet ingredients get measured out.  This is the first of two half-sheet cakes that we made for the cake.  Each half sheet cake used about 25 eggs.

The wet ingredients get mixed and then set aside.

Then it’s time for the dry ingredients.

Then the wet meets the dry in slow increments.

And once again a merinque gets made.

And then folded slowly into the mixture to give it an extra fluffy texture.

There was so much batter that I wasn’t sure it’d fit into my large kitchen aid mixer, so for the first batch I ended up splitting the batter into two bowls.

Then the batter goes into the pan and into the oven to bake.

Here is the cake after baking.  A half sheet cake is quite a large cake.

A nice close up of a corner of the cake.

Now comes time to start carving.  This is a leveled piece that is ready for frosting.  This piece will eventually become the base of the final cake.

The base gets frosted and stacked two cakes high.  The whole thing was then frosted and put into the fridge to harden the frosting so that applying the fondant is easier.

Then it was time to color all the gum paste and fondant for the cake.  I did them all in one sitting and then set them aside inside plastic bags to keep them soft.

Then it was time to frost and carve the ice cream truck for the cake.  It was three cakes high.

Here is the truck after carving and icing.

This is the orange fondant for the base of the cake all rolled out.  I ended up doing a poor job of rolling and in the end you could definitely tell that the fondant wasn’t all of the same thickness.  I’ve earned a new appreciation for rolling pin spacers, though since the pieces of fondant was so large, I would have needed a larger rolling pin.  Also, you’ll notice here one of my favorite kitchen item, the rollpat.  It is basically a large version of a silpat that is specifically designed to roll things out on.  I don’t end up getting to use it often enough since I rarely have space for it to be laid out.  It is also the perfect surface for kneading bread.

The base of the cake gets covered with the orange fondant.  We ended up getting tears at most of the corners.  Also, I’m not quite sure how to get the vertical edges to be perfect.  We ended up using kitchen scissors and cutting the excess down off the edges and then smoothing the pieces together.

Here is an early incarnation of the walrus.  We decided to make him out of rice crispy treat since it would be easier to shape that way than trying to carve cake.

Then it was time to make the ice cream man.  He is made entirely from gum paste.  These are early legs that turned out too large for the cake.  Also, we discovered that putting some vegetable shortening on your fingers and working a little into the gum paste will stop it from drying out so quickly or sticking to your fingers.

Here is the gum paste ice cream man drying.  Next to him is two sets of tusks for the walrus.  We made two because we weren’t sure of the final size of the walrus.

Here is the walrus after being covered with fondant and in the process of further shaping of the fondant.

And just to prove that he is rice crispy treat, here is the underside of the walrus.

We put squares of the grey fondant onto the ice cream truck where the doors and windows would be.  Then covered the entire truck with white fondant and cut out the windows and doors.  After that we combined black gel food dye with vodka to create a dye to paint on the details of the truck.

Here is the walrus with his large tusks and having been sprayed with some black spray food dye for shading.

And here are all the final pieces, prior to assembling them on the cake.

And now it’s time for assembly.  Here is the base of the cake.

The walrus goes on first.

Followed by the ice cream man.

Then we put some dowels into the cake to hold the ice cream truck up off the cake so that the wheels would look more realistic.

Then the ice cream truck went onto the cake.

Here is the final cake with all pieces on.

And a close up of the walrus’s face.

And the ice cream man.

And the ice cream truck.

Here is the cake from a different view.  My wife insisted on painting on the headlights for the ice cream truck so that it’d be more realistic.

And then came the hard part.  For the competition you had to take pictures of you cutting into everything to prove that it was cake.

This is the piece we cut out of the base.

And this is the piece cut out of the ice cream truck.

This is ice cream truck after the carnage.

All in all it was a fun process, even if it took longer than we thought.  But we definitely learned a lot about cake decorating and got a new appreciation for those that do it for a living.