Guitar Cake

Wow, how time flies! My first born turned 30 today!!! He requested a guitar cake for his birthday so I did the best I could by him.

I used a guitar we had around the house for the details & used an ukulele (funny lookin' word) for scale. The cake is my experimental version of carrot cake (which I do not like & had to trust E.S.C. for quality control) w/ Edna's crusting cream cheese buttercream, covered & decorated in fondant. It is missing strings because I could not for the life of me figure out how to get straight edible strings on this beast (I will be purchasing a clay extruder in the near future). A lovely lady that I met at work told me to use licorice- talk about AHA moments! Sadly, I was not able to locate any black licorice in time (found scads of red licorice). I will be doing another bigger guitar in August & will have solved my problem by then. I carved this cake in three pieces (body, neck & tuner top) out of a 9x13 sheet and just pieced it together.

Friends & family use the nickname "Amp" for my son so I I made a pick to honor that.

In honor of his 30th Birthday.

The black pieces are fondant. The light brown was fondant marbled to get a wood grain & the dark brown was painted on using brown gel color & vodka. I then painted the lines on the neck & brushed the whole thing w/ vodka to get a nice sheen.

The Cake Truffles were covered in white chocolate; however, they turned out very ugly (but tasty according to Quality Control) so I did not take pictures- maybe next time. Thanks for looking.

Iron Man Mask

It's been slow going for cake making lately, but I finally have a couple of new cakes to post.

One of my sweet grandsons turned the Big 0-4 this month & had an Iron Man themed party so G'ma was asked to make the cake. Yay! The cake is my own version of a WASC Chocolate w/ chocolate buttercream, covered in fondant. My trusty Executive Sous Chef helped me carve the contours of the mask out of a 12" double layer round (I bought a mask as a model & then gifted it to the birthday boy). We did not get it exactly right but I was afraid we wouldn't have enough cake if we kept carving.

I used a color wheel to figure out the right combo of red to get. The mask is white fondant painted w/ gold pearl dust & the eye cut outs are also white fondant painted w/ silver pearl dust. I used the #12 tip to make the screw impressions on the mask. I cut out the mouth & replaced the cut out w/ black fondant.

I also have been having trouble figuring out what to do with all of the left over cake & finally tweaked the cake ball recipe to come up w/ my version of Cake Truffles (no pictures, but they are super delicious) & I have decided to include them as an extra w/ each cake I make. I will try to remember to take pictures the next time.