I thought I would try two new things - a new cake (yes - cake, not cupcake) experiment and a new Blog experiment. First, I hope the Blog experiment works. I created a slide show of pictures from my Cake Tatoo Experiment. You should see this above - I hope. The Cake Tatoo Experiment was something I thought I would try for a cake I was bringing to a friends house for a BBQ. It was not a success, but also not a total disaster. I used
Duff's Cake Tattoo. Duff is the cake designer from
Charm City Cakes that is featured on the Food Network show
Ace of Cakes. I am bummed that I can't watch this show. We don't have cable (we just get over the air stations) and they don't air this on
hulu. I also can't find the DVDs on Netflix. Oh well! Anyway, the Cake Tattoo is a thin piece of edible art that you place on an iced cake. I am a bit miffed because in this
video (If you are interested I think you'll have to click on the Watch Video link and scroll down to view the Graffiti and Killer Cake Bling video) Duff said it will totally look awesome. Not so much, but I won't hold it agaisnt him. I mean, if he did it, it probably would look totally awesome! Anyway, when I did mine my base cake was too small and so the cake tatoo wouldn't exactly fit. So, I had to cut the bottom a little. Also, I could not get the seams right. You can see that in the pictures. I was happier with the upper tier. It didn't look too bad. I then used blue icing with a decorator tip to add some extra pizazz! I was a little too embarrassed to bring this to the BBQ because Josh said it looked like he was eating paper. It may have looked a little wonky, but it tasted okay (for days....). Maybe I'll have to just try Duff's Cake Graffiti products. Maybe spraying designs would be easier... Stay on the lookout for that at some point (maybe).
Okay, so it was my friend Aaron's birthday this past weekend. I had these grand plans to re-create something I found on the Charm City Cakes website (this is the "Ace of Cakes" bakery). Who was I kidding! I spend a week trying to figure out how I was going to re-create the TI-84 Graphing Calculator Cake you see below. I had some of it figured out - I even did some math to do this. I used my scanner to scan in my own graphing calculator. I then enlarged the image so that it was about the size of a 9 x 13 in. cake. I was then able to print it and use it as a template for cutting out my fondant pieces. That all worked out fine, but when it came to being able to write on all the little fondant pieces the only success I had was the white keys. For these I was able to use my black food writer. However, most of the keys are gray or black and I was not able to find a good way to write such small text on these keys since none of my food writers would work. Then came trying to get the right color gray fondant and being able to use this to cover the 9 x 13 in cake. I got the fondant to be on okay gray color, but man of man, did it look pretty bad when I put it all on the actual cake. Believe me - nobody would have wanted to eat it! :-) Sorry, no pictures! So, I decided I just couldn't do this. All hail
Ace of Cakes! You are amazing! How cool is this cake?!?! So, I decided that since I agreed to make the cake that I would quickly swap out the calculator cake with some birthday cupcakes instead. These are my usual chocolate cupcakes with cream cheese icing. I decided to do something different than my usual star tip for the icing. I piped these on without a tip to create little mounds of icing. I then used my Wilton Alphabet and Number Fondant Cutters to cut out the letters and numbers for "Happy 31st Birthday Aaron!" These were a little rushed, but in the end I think they were cute and people thought they were tasty. So, that is a plus! Here's one more picture - a close up. From now on, I think I'll stick to cupcakes, or at least simple cakes for now! :-)
