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.

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.