The Cake-tastrophe Part 2: What Went Wrong?

One of the hazards of being a mostly self-taught cake artist: the "errors" in the "trial and error" process.

This one was a doozy.

Rapunzel's Tower cake in the morning

I introduced you to this project in my last post, The Cake-tastrophe Part 1: "Just Like on Those Cake Shows", but here's the set-up in a nutshell.

What my boss said: "Hey Gitu, can you make a Tangled cake Charlotte's birthday? Nothing crazy, just for 4 people. Any time this weekend, or even next weekend. It would make for a nice surprise. Feel free to say no if you can't take it on."

What I heard: "Hey Gitu, don't you want to try making a Tangled cake with a 3D RKT tower, covered with marbled rocks? Oh and maybe you can hand-sculpt a Rapunzel and give her lots of delicate blond hair that will be impossibly hard to handle. By this Sunday please."

What could go wrong? Where do I begin.

Rapunzel's Tower cake when I left it the night before

Let's start with the obvious flaws:

1. Engineering: An 8 inch round cake that's 5-ish inches tall will not support a 15-inch RKT tower covered in layers of heavy fondant. Even with double dowels. 
2. Deliciousness vs. Design: Said cake will be even less able to support said tower if it is torted thinly and filled with ganache. This was five layers of chocolate WASC cake. Would I have fared better if I had used two thick layers of pound cake and crusting butterceam instead?
3. Aesthetic vs. Assembly: Ideally, this project would have been finished in two separate pieces, and the tower would be placed on the cake right before presentation. But I wanted Rapunzel's hair to fall all the way from the tower and down the cake and the only way to do that was to apply the hair after  the cake and tower were attached. Wrong decision.
4. Equipment and Storage: The cake was too tall to fit in my refrigerator. It was pretty hare-brained of me to think that I could leave it out on the counter overnight and expect it to maintain its structural integrity. Remember, we're talking about thinly torted WASC cake and ganache here. Unrefrigerated. When I close my eyes I can see the layers settling, and softening, and sliding about in slow motion, as I slept. 
5. This is where you come in. What's your experience with 3D cakes that challenge gravity? Do you have any horror stories of your own and what can I learn from them? Please share.

In the meantime, here's a look at the 15 hours of labor that went into this cake, before going down the drain.

Home-made fondant to cover the cake board. This batch was so difficult to work with, but I persevered. It ended up in the garbage.

5 layers of chocolate WASC cake, filled and frosted with a rich dark chocolate ganache. I'd say this was the most delicious cake I had made up to this point.

I know because I ate most of it with my hands, while sobbing, before throwing the rest out.

In the garbage.

(JK about the sobbing, but wasn't it fun to picture it?)

First time using RKT to create a 3D cake. I used a PVC pipe to shape the bottom part (wrapped in plastic for protection) and sculpted the top by hand.

Only for it to be dumped in the garbage.

Fondant colored and marbled by hand to resemble rocks and applied piece by individual piece to the tower.

Before ending up in the garbage.

Rapunzel face and torso, sculpted by hand.
Check out that cleavage.

It's now in the garbage.

Wood embellishment painstakingly painted and etched onto top of tower.

And then later thrown in the garbage.

Purple fondant shingles cut by hand and applied individually to the roof of the tower.

Not the best job, but certainly not bad enough to throw in the garbage?

Blond hair made of yellow fondant and disco dust, delicately extruded into skeins of fragile filaments.

And then dumped, along with everything else, in the garbage.

Not seen here: me using a pair of tweezers to make sure every last intricate strand fell perfectly in place down Rapunzel's tower.

Buttercream grass, fondant bushes and flowers, candy rocks and even a stream made of blue piping gel.

Now that I think about it, the stream was probably also part of the reason that this cake ended up...

in the garbage.

Finding Nemo Cake: A Tutorial in Pictures

One of my favorite movies, and now one of my favorite cakes (it's got glitter!) This Finding Nemo cake was for a double birthday party for two 3-year-olds. Our friends' daughter, Zoe, wanted Nemo, and her birthday buddy, Parker, wanted a dinosaur (more on that later.)

I started this project about a week early, making the decorations in batches during the week.

I picked up a seashell candy mold from Michaels for $1.99 and used candy melts that I already had left over from making cake pops.

Really, I should have used pastry bags or a parchment cone to pipe in the melted candy, but I was lazy and just smeared it in messily with the back of a small spoon (so, yes, the piping bag is "staged" for this shot. But check out my awesome spoon designed to hang on the side of your teacup! Or tupperware, in this case.)

The shells popped out easily after a quick chill in the fridge. They're a bit holey and raggedy-looking. I bet using the piping bag would have helped. Sometimes I like to take short cuts a little too much for my own good. Whatever. Real shells aren't perfect anyway.


Another option for the shells would have been to press fondant into the molds. With that method you can brush them with pearl/luster dust and make them look rill purdy.

To make the coral, I piped melted candy out of a small parchment cone and then sprinkled colored sugar on them while they were still wet. I found the lumpier and more misshapen the design, the more they looked like coral.

Side note: I had tried another method of making the coral earlier, which involved piping royal icing onto grape stems (tutorial here.) It didn't work out so well for me, though I think it's because I had a bad batch of RI. Still, I like my method better because you can actually eat it.

More coral made from leftover bits of colored fondant (I save and try to reuse everything! See the parchment scraps in the picture above?) 

For the curly ones, I made thin snakes, flattened them a little and then folded them up into themselves. 

The round ones are just little bits of rolled up fondant poked with a boning/veining tool.

I also made a few of these coral thingamabobs in different sizes and colors, but didn't end up using them. They're made of fondant/gum paste combo so they can dry hard.

Just free-form roll out pieces of your 50/50 and cut out different-sized holes. I used a piping tip, a bubble tea straw, and a regular drinking straw. Then I used the straws as "formers" to make the coral dry wavy. If you make these you can place them standing up on top of your cake.

More 50/50 used here to make Zoe's name. I used my extruder to make rope, formed them into the letters, and let them dry overnight.

Another side note here, about "gum glue":  My Wilton method teacher introduced me to this (shout out to Lisa at the Colma Michael's store!) I haven't seen it used on any cake show or online tutorial, but I think it's a better adhesive than water or piping gel. All you do is dissolve a little chunk of gum paste in water and brush it on.

I also love it because I can use up my dried hard bits of leftover gum paste (again, nothing is wasted around here!) Sometimes I don't even bother waiting for it to dissolve - I just daub my brush on the wet lump and get going. You'll notice after a while it will have morphed into a smooth gluey liquid.

I used my gum glue to glitterfy Zoe's name. I just brushed it onto the letters and went nuts with the disco dust. 

BUT FIRST! I lined a dish with parchment paper so I could be very generous with the glitter and then funnel the excess back into its container (say it with me - zero waste!)

Obviously, I let the glue and glitter dry before picking up or moving the letters.

Moving on now to the piece de resistance: Nemo! He's made of RKT. 

I like to use a bowl to form rounded RKT figures. You can just press it into the concave sides of the bowl till it's just the right shape.

RKT Nemo was then brushed with gum glue and covered in orange homemade MMF before I added his features. I think the little white bits applied to Nemo's eyes with a tweezer really made him come to life.

The fins were made of 50/50 so they could dry hard and stand up straight.

Oh, I also made seaweed out of marbled green fondant. 

After I was done making all the decorations, I started working on the cake. 2 layers of yellow cake, chocolate ganache filling - not seen here, that white stuff is the buttercream dam - and a surprise rainbow cake layer for Zoe! (I cut it from a 10" square I had in the freezer left over from my fire truck cake.)

I know what you're thinking. Why didn't I torte the cakes? Um... I blame this misstep on remnants of trauma from a recent "cake fail" where I torted my cakes nice and thin and they collapsed under the weight of the cake topper.

Ya right. I was just being lazy.

This cake would have tasted a lot better if I had torted the layers. And I would have been able to get the same height with less cake.

(P.S. the cake fail story is true. check back for a post on that soon.)

Next, the cake got a generous frosting with light blue buttercream.  I didn't really go in with a plan, it just came about. 

I started frosting the top and noticed that it looked better messy. I patted the frosting with my offset spatula and it formed the perfect chop for Nemo's oceanscape. 

I did know that I wanted to use my new icing comb on the side of the cake. I played with straight and wavy movements until it looked perfectly imperfect.

Life is so much easier when a lack of precision actually works in my favor : )

A squiggle of thin consistency BC was piped around the bottom of the cake to hold the "sand", which was really brown sugar. I used dark, but light would have been better. (Even better would have been crushed graham crackers, because you'd actually enjoy eating it.)

I didn't take a picture, but I used a funnel to apply the sugar (you can make one out of parchment paper, or cut a corner right out of the bag.) I used my fingers to pat it down and contain the mess. 

The final step was adding the decorations. 

Nemo got a little support from some bubble tea straws embedded in the cake. 

I used another, taller straw to attach Nemo and keep him from moving. Just make sure it doesn't stick out of the cake taller than he is (I've done that before.)  I used a straw to make a hole in Nemo's bottom first, and then... um... impaled him.

And finally finally, I positioned the shells and corals in the sugar sand, put the letters in place, and stuck on the seaweed (probably would have been easier to do the seaweed before the sand, but it worked out fine.)

DONE-ZO!

Here's Nemo and his Dinosaur friend at Zoe and Parker's birthday party. They were a hit! 

My husband says the dinosaur looks possessed, but I'd like to believe he was just jealous because it was also his birthday and he didn't get a dinosaur cake. I'll be posting pics from the dinosaur cake project soon and maybe he can have a go at it.