Thursday, October 21, 2010

Party Penguin!

The cake I made for the boyfriend's birthday. It actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Granted the cake was a boxed cake, but the frosting and the fondant was made all by hand. Also the fondant probably isn't the kind you'd get from a professional bakery, as it was made of marshmallow fluff and powdered sugar, but I thought it tasted a lot better. Normally I don't eat fondant off of cakes because I don't like the flavor, but this kind was better.

Here are some of the steps - not all of them because my hand were sticky and covered in sugar a lot of the time, so I didn't want that in my camera

So enlarged the picture that I was trying to make the cake look like, cut it out and used that as a stencil to carve the cake. I then added a layer of butter cream frosting that I made, but that didn't make it into a photo.


First layer of fondant. Took awhile to get it to a big enough size because it kept getting stuck to the board I was rolling it out on and ripping. It's definitely better to constantly move the fondant around and sugar it (versus flouring it)


This one has the belly - I made the initial shape with my hands and then rolled it out to make it bigger


Here are the wings - I rolled out some blue and then cut out the wings from my cake carving stencil for a fondant stencil. I cut around with a butter knife to get the shape, and then smoothed out the edges the best I could. A sharper knife probably would have left nicer edges, but I didn't really have one.


And Tada! There's the rest of him! Rolled out green and orange for the hat and feet. Lied it on top of the blue and trimmed. Everything else was pretty much a geometrical shape that was easy to make. I didn't use any thing to stick fondant on top of each other - everything just stuck to itself.


One last time with the flash! It came out pastel because well everything you start with is white, which fades out the food dye color. I was also semi afraid of adding too much dye in because at the time of making the fondant it seemed to be staining the sides of the bowls I was using. And the more I added the worse it got. In the end it didn't stain the bowls, so if I ever do a fondant cake I'd add more dye in to get darker colors. Oh it's also a lot easier to dye the fluff before adding the sugar - otherwise you have to knead it into white fondant which could be real hard.


~emy