Cake Decorating – creating a masterpiece

It has struck me recently how many creative and talented colleagues and friends I have and I wanted to showcase some of their creations and stories for you.

Deb started doing cake decorating to surprise and delight her daughter for her birthday and it has now become somewhat of an annual tradition. We look forward each year to seeing the photos of the cake progressing and trying to guess what the final product will look like.

Deb says that her first foray into cake decorating was modest.  She baked sheet cakes and then cut out into the shape of the children’s character Totoro.  Her very artistic partner Mark iced the cake and she was delighted by the result of their team work.

Emboldened by this success, Deb got a what she thought was a only bit more ambitious. After googling key terms about how to cover a cake with sugar paste icing, she thought she had it all sorted. Armed with a template of Princess Twilight Sparkle (from My Little Pony) and a couple of kilograms of Petticine icing Deb directed Mark in cutting the shape out of the sheet cakes she had made.  All that was left to do was colour and roll out the icing to the large size required then deftly lift and drape it over the cake for Mark to add the finishing piped touches to.  If you have dealt with sugar paste icing in humid environments, you will appreciate that this turned out to be much harder than anticipated.  The sugar paste cover had been made too friable by the large amount of icing sugar added during the colouring process to stop it being so sticky.  So, the ‘deft draping’ turned into a shower of icing pieces as the covering fell into pieces as it was lifted over the cake.  Luckily, Mark came to the rescue and patiently piped the whole cake over the course of two days.

Because of all the panicked calls to her cake decorating sister during the Princess Twilight Sparkle Debacle, Deb was sent on a cake decorating class run by Emma @ Strawberry Sky Cakes as a birthday present (Strawberry Sky Cakes is unfortunately no longer operating). She was completely intimidated when she walked in and saw what she was going to make but the instructions were easy to follow and the cake turned out to look pretty amazing.  She was particularly proud of her teddy bear!

With the skills learned not only in the art of draping sugar paste over cakes but also in creating paste models, Deb has gone on to use corn flour and silicon mats to work with sugar paste and always now does it sitting under the air conditioning unit.

 

Here are some of Deb’s more recent creations and the series of teaser photos that we got to see along the way:

2019 A Trolls Theme

 

2020 Rainbow Ruby Theme