A few weeks ago, Mum told me that a lady she knows from her work asked her if I would be interested in making cakes for her sons’ birthday party this Saturday. Apparently Mum talks about my baking escapades enough to garner interest from people who don’t know me. Cool! Even though I’m really busy with uni and Panto right now, I accepted readily. I’ve only ever made cakes as gifts for friends or family, or for myself, but I’ve been thinking about selling cakes for a little over a year, and it was one of my New Years Resolutions to do so, so this was the big opportunity!
The ~customer~ wanted two cakes. Both chocolate. One decorated with Lightning McQueen from the Pixar film Cars, and the other a guitar. I made the cakes last Sunday and froze them, carved them and did the crumb coats of icing yesterday, then finished decorating today. It took me about 15 hours all up. But I work pretty slow 😛 The Lightning McQueen one was my first attempt at creating a 3D cake which required building rather than just cutting out a shape, and I was really really happy with it.
I think they ended up fancier than the woman will be expecting. Mum’s dropping them off at the party tomorrow so I hope she’s impressed.
Lightning McQueen:
Stage one: Building. I think anything I’d have to say in explanation is apparent in the picture, so, tadah.
Stage Two: Crumb coat. All hail swiss buttercream. At this stage I also added the spoiler to the back of the car, which was a thin rectangle of cake basically drenched in buttercream so it would stay in place. I also added to the countouring at the back and the front, because Lightning McQueen is a curvy sort of dude.
End result! I was really excited that I managed to make the buttercream red and not pink, as I only had the cheap liquid colouring. I added some cocoa and it boosted the redness, which is awesome. The kid’s name is Kyle, hence the word ‘Kyle’ at the front 😛 All the frosting is buttercream except the dark brown outline and tyres, which is ganache. The lightning bolts on the sides were really hard.
Hello.
Also he is turning 5, hence the 5.
Yay.
Guitar:
Crumb coat stage.
I had carved the car by eye, but decided to use a template for the guitar shape. I printed off a large picture and placed it on top of the cake, using a skewer to puncture a dot-to-dot style outline to cut out of the cake. The rectangular cake caddy I have is the biggest convenient transporter surface I had to put the cake on, and I couldn’t fit a properly proportioned guitar on it without making the body of it too small for reasonable eating, so I had to either shorten the neck or chop off the head. I’d made a really nice head so at this stage it won.
But then I decided it looked ridiculous so went for decapitated guitar. Again, buttercream and ganache. The strings were a bitch.
Rawk. This kid is turning 14 or something, so I asked my 14 year old sister whether a boy her age would find the addition of the stars too feminine. She didn’t seem to think so.
IT WAS FUN. The end.
This Is Not An Orange Blog 
cool photo story bro.
…ta
Sorry, that was a lot more sincere in my head.
Wow…. you are awesome!
I am so impressed that you pulled this off! I like that you made the buttercream work, it definitely would taste better than those hard icings.
Thanks!
Yeah, tbh I’ve used a hard icing once, and it felt so unnatural. I drowned it in vanilla essence during the colouring process (i was making it brown, using green and red, for this: http://i54.tinypic.com/21joklu.jpg), so it didn’t actually taste terrible, but it just seemed strange. I have no inclination to make many fondant-covered cakes in the future. Also I think Australians who eat cake other than wedding cake ever and don’t read baking blogs aren’t accustomed to fondant anyway, as evidenced by the fact that it’s not that readily available to buy. Long live buttercream. Taste above all!
How’d you do the pages in that book?
It was a thick layer of white chocolate ganache, and i used a blunt knife to make indentations to look like gaps between pages.