I had a couple of brother in law's who have birthdays at the first part of August...so I decided to put my newly acquired cake decorating - learning - skills to the test.
Jared - Jason's younger brother was first....hmmm...this is a hard one...what does he love to do? Well from the stories I hear, he is constantly playing video games when he is at home...so what could I do? So I decided to try my hand at molding a playstation paddle out of marshmellow fondant. I am not claiming to be a sculpture by any means and the marshmellow fondant was a little too sticky and melty to work with really well - but all things considered, I think I did a pretty good job!
I decided to cover the cake board with tin foil since the last one I did seeped the grease into the board from the frosting! I used my new oval cake pans that came with my Wilton Course 2 kit!
I decided to make a yellow butter cake and at the last minute threw in some semi sweet chocolate chips - they all sunk to the bottom of the cakes, but once I put the layers together they were on the top and the bottom of the cake! Yummy!!
Since I was adding chocolate to the mix, I decided to make a chocolate mousse with some cream cheese, whipped cream, a little milk and a little chocolate pudding mix!
Covered with white buttercream! Not perfect, but getting better at smoothing it out! The buttercream was a little too thin, so when I used the Viva paper towel to smooth it out, it was sticking to the icing! Oops! Note to self - keep icing a little thicker next time!
Now for the PIECE DE RESISTANCE - the marshmellow fondant Playstation paddle! TA-DA!
I used some of the extra fondant to make the power cord - and had it coming out of the paddle down around the cake for the bottom trim of the cake and then to the front with the plug in part of the cord!
Everyone loved it! I even had some family members taking bites out of the paddle and the power cord!
Next was my other brother in law, Kasey. What should I do for him? He is a police officer so I could do something on those lines - or he is big into karate so I could do that - or how about guns...he likes guns (but my sister vetod that one saying "who would want to dig into a gun cake and eat it" So true so that one is out!) My mom emailed me the symbol of Kasey's karate stuff so I decided on that!
Can I start by saying that this Wilton Cake Release stuff is AMAZING?!?!?! You just pour this stuff into your pans - brush it around and *Presto* out FALLS your cakes! Wonderful!
Once the cakes were baked and cooled in the freezer for a little while, I cut the tops off and made the filling! Kasey is a huge fan of the lemon cake and lemon filling and lemon icing! Though I wanted to use the buttercream for the icing, I did make lemon cake and made a lemon filling! Same as how I made the chocolate mousse for Jared's cake, I make lemon mousse for Kasey's! Mmmmm.....
Now all iced up and ready for the decorations!!
This is the template I was prepared to do...but once I fit it over the cake, I noticed the black outline was not going to fit! So I just put some wax paper over the template and traced out the little man and the swirly black part with my black piping gel...then layed it over the cake and pressed gently. The unforseen problem was this...the piping gel is sticky!!! And squishy!!! Once I layed it on my cake, I could see that it was starting to squish in places that I did not want it to squish. So not wanting to squish too much I just lightly pressed all over the template. The other mess was once I pulled up the template, the STICKY piping gel did not want to let go of that template - so small points where it clung to the template as I lifted, fell back onto the cake NOT in the place they were supposed to be! Needless to say after about an hour of fixing with a small toothpick, and scraping off the small amount of the little karate dude - it finally ended up looking somewhat presentable!
I wanted to add some color so I decided on red...what to do? I will add some balloons! It IS his birthday!
The balloons on the sides looked good - until the piping gel decided it wanted to live by the law of gravity! They started sliding off of the cake so I had to take my trusty toothpick and remove the excess of piping gel so that there was only a small amount and would not decide to drip down!
Turned out pretty good! Some good lessons learned! Now HURRY and put it in the fridge to set up those dang red balloons! :) Hope Kasey likes it!
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