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High Res Image)
After I created by 3D cake submission for this year’s Threadcakes contest, I decided I wanted to submit a 2D cake which displayed different techniques from that used on my Surrealist Bird submission. That cake embodied cake sculpting and a lot of painting. For this submission, I had two requirements: (a) I wanted to implement a variety of fondant techniques; and (b) I wanted to select an image that I thought would take less than 40 hours to create. I selected The Emergence of the Easter Egg by Attila Szamosi. Oh how my eyes deceived me! All I can say is to never judge a book by its cover. This submission was far more time consuming than my 3D version despite its size. It took over 40 hours.
When I selected The Emergence of the Easter Egg, I saw something I could create on a 9” round cake using a limited number of colors -- white, brown, yellow and orange coloring. Four colors should be a piece of cake. Ha. When I started to mix my fondant colors, I found out that there are so many more colors within this one image. There is a range of yellow and orange hues and actually no brown. The color is closer to burgundy. It took a solid evening to nail down my color palette. Not one color was a direct squirt of gel from the Americolor Gel bottle. I had to mix between 2-4 colors per t-shirt design color to get it just right. I posted a few photos of my attempts at matching the colors.
The next evening, after a long day at work, I looked at the samples I made and then reproduced my best options in larger quantities. I knew if I ran out of color in the middle of the project it would be hard to match again. After producing the right quantities, I set my colors aside to settle and moved on to stacking the cakes I made the prior day. I made a modified yellow and a modified chocolate cake. Each had sour cream and a pudding package in them. My taste testers from my last submission loved the flavors so much that I wanted to make them again. While preparing the cakes for their filling, I knew that I wanted to cut the top layer of cake on a slant so one could view the t-shirt design from a better angle.
As for the filling, I wanted to alternate chocolate ganache and buttercream. While I have tasty Swiss Meringue and Italian Meringue buttercream recipes, I knew I couldn’t use them in this cake. Besides having a heat wave in New York which would cause the filling to liquefy, I knew my family was going to eat the cake while on a picnic in the park. I went online and found a recipe by Gale Gand which required powdered sugar, butter, heavy cream and a flavor extract. I substituted orange for her vanilla extract. Using the heavy cream and the orange extract made an amazing cake filling. I never used heavy cream in this type of recipe before, but I will always use it in the future. You just have to try it for yourself.
To keep the color scheme going, my first layer of cake was covered with a yellow buttercream. I then added a few drops of orange to the remaining icing and made a mid-orange color and then covered the next layer of cake. I then added a few more orange gel drops to the remaining buttercream to make a deeper orange. As I stacked the cakes, I kept thinking that I couldn’t wait to slice the cakes to see how the colors would appear.
Once the cakes were stack and iced, the “fun” began. I should really say challenge here. I really thought I could complete the cake in a day or two. My mother was visiting at that time and kept saying to me, “Are you nuts? This is a lot harder than it looks.” To that, I rolled my eyes and said no problem, it’s a bunch of dots and lines.
As you can see from the photos, each section of the bird is rather intricate. I was not able to complete any section in one attempt, except for the striped belly. I had to make each section more than once to get it close to the original design. For example, with the tail feathers I had to figure out a way to show you all of the colored lines. Painting or using a mold would have been an easy out. But, I made the decision to use only fondant by hand. I finally figured out that I could lay a pin or a palette knife across the tail shape to make a groove which I then inlayed would tiny strips of fondant. Other sections required stacking various size circles upon one another in different colors. I accomplished that by cutting circles with different size icing tips. As you review the photos, you can see how intricate the bird actually is. The 2D cake is very deceptive; it has its own obstacles that must be overcome.
To sum it up, this bird required a ton of tiny cuts from circles, triangles, tear drops, flames and stripes, a variety of fondant colors, marquetry or inlay techniques and perseverance (of course, this is left out of the recipe but it really is the most important ingredient). I posted the last photo to reveal some of the methods that did not work here. But, those methods did produce some cool results that I intend to use in future projects.
