Cake Painting

I love all my cake clients (well, almost all), but I have one in particular who gives me the most fantastic design opportunities. She has an innate faith in me that whatever I end up doing will be fabulous, but I must give her credit for seeing a design and thinking.... ah, THAT would be a cool cake!

Example:

This is a MacKenzie-Childs enamel cake carrier. Admittedly, I'd never heard of this brand, but I am in love. My client's mom collects pieces from this brand and she thought a cake made to look like the cake carrier would make a fantastic birthday cake.

At first I was a little scared at all the flowery detail - especially as to how I was going to recreate it in fondant. But then I thought... this design needs to be painted. And I love painting, but never have time to do it anymore because I'm always making cakes!

Worlds are colliding.

I never realized that fondant makes a perfect canvas for food coloring gels. I got new food-safe brushes, a cheap plastic palate and squeezed my gel colors in with a tiny bit of water.

Then I went to town.

I'm hooked! It was so fun to create this way. I felt like I was back in my old neighborhood after-school watercolor classes. I think I painted every week for 2-3 years... then went on to paint frequently with my grandma. I once even wrote a letter to Bob Ross that he replied to. Dude.

The courtly check pattern on the base is cut from fondant, then glazed with a corn syrup/alcohol mixture.

I only had that once picture to go from, plus a few grainy jpegs from image searches, so I kind of imagined a lot of these flowers.

The cake itself is butter pecan filled with vanilla buttercream and ribbons of caramel.

Now if only I could incorporate my other hobbies into cake-making. Crochet? Scrapbooking? Realty TV watching? Any ideas??

 

Comments

[Melinda]

Wow! What a work of art!

[Emma]

Beautiful!

[Trudy Holtz]

Great design work! Love the shape of the cake top too. Try cross-stitch patterns or use basic embroidery shapes. It will take forever in piped icing, or much less time in this painted format. Great blog.
~Trudy http://thriftscore42.blogspot.com/