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.

Zombie Wedding Cake (Part 2)

This is the second half of this post.  For the first half please see this post.

The previous post was all about the baking and creation of the various pieces of the cake.  This post is about the decorations, decorating and assembly of the zombie wedding cake.

On the cake, in addition to the zombies, the bride and groom wanted cherry blossoms to match their wedding invitations.  These, along with the figures, were all made by my wife.  For more detail on the creation of these, you can check out her blog post about them.

The cherry blossoms were made out of gum paste.  To make the gum paste easier to work work, vegetable shortening was kneaded into the gum paste.  The gum paste was then rolled out into a thin sheet.

Then small circles were cute from the sheet of gum paste.

The edges were then rolled even thinner.

And a general flower shape cut out.

The flower was then pressed out with a sculpting tool to give the petals a ruffled shape.

The flowers were then places into an egg carton to give them a three dimensional shape.

Pre-made flower stamens were added to each flower.

Then the flowers dried overnight in their egg carton.

Then my wife hand painted each flower with food coloring thinned out with vodka.

Next up my wife made the figures for the cake.  She made a bride and groom for the top of the cake, plus three zombies for the lower tiers of the cake.  The interior of the figures were made from aluminum foil in a rough shape of a person.

The foil armatures were then covered with super sculpy.  She chose to make them out of this inedible material since it would not only be easier to sculpt but the bride and groom could keep the figures indefinitely.

Here is a fully sculpted zombie that is missing his left arm.  They were then baked in the oven to harden and painted.

Here once again are the cakes.  The small chocolate cake in the front with a red velvet cake in the rear.  Each layer was trimmed to make it perfectly round and also the tops were leveled.

Here is the bottom layer of the 14 inch cake.  It was placed on a cardboard cake board.  To stop the orange filling from pushing out the sides of the cake when cakes were placed on top, some buttercream was piped around the edges.  Then the orange filling was spread evening on the layer.

The second layer of this tier was placed on top of the filling, with the bottom up.  Even with leveling, the bottom of the cake is mush smoother and more level than what used to be the top of the cake.  The buttercream icing is put on top the tier and then spread out and down the sides.

The buttercream icing is smoothed out as much as possible.  The cake then goes into the fridge to allow the buttercream icing to harden to make it easier to cover the cake with fondant.

We decided to use the wedding white buttercream flavored fondant from Fondarific.  Fondarific is a specific brand of fondant that doesn’t dry out, gives you more time to work with it, and most importantly tastes great.  However, it does tend to be a bit stickier and harder to work with than normal fondant.  The taste though, makes it worth while, we found ourselves eating the scraps that got left over.

To cover the cakes, they were removed from the fridge after the buttercream was hard and not sticky to the touch.  I rolled out the fondant and made a rough covering of the cake, cutting off the excess with a knife.  However, as you can see from the image, it is very rough and bumpy.

My wife used a fondant smoother to make each tier smooth and have a good angle on the top.  Once each tier was completed it was boxed up and put back into the fridge.  A small sheet of non-slip shelf liner was put between the cake board and the box to stop the cake from sliding around in the cake box.

The next morning, the boxes were put in the back of our station wagon.  More non-slip shelf liner was used between each cake box and the floor of the car to stop the boxes from sliding around while driving.  The flowers, figures, and other decorating pieces were also packed up into the car.

At the venue we started assembling the cake.  Here are the first three tiers.  In each tier hard plastic dowel rods were cut and driven into the cake to help support the weight of the upper tiers.

Here is the full cake without any decorations.

A green ribbon was attached to the bottom of each tier.  This ribbon makes a huge difference in the look of the cake.  The fondant is still very lumpy even after smoothing, but the ribbon makes the lumps a lot less noticeable.

Here is the cake with all the ribbons attached to the tiers.

The figures were the next to go on the cake.  They were attached with bamboo skewers and royal icing.

After all the figures were on, the cherry blossoms were attached using royal icing.  This is the final cake with everything on it.

Here is a view from the back side of the cake.

And of course, here’s the bride and groom cutting the cake.