Beauty Immortal

I.Love.This.Design. As soon as I saw the design, I knew I wanted to try making it in cake. I know that this design would challenge me in different areas of cake decorating: cake carving, gum paste flowers, royal icing butterfly wings, and Dias de Los Muertos painting. I have tried counting the hours it took me to make this cake from start to finish, and I come up with a figure between 20 to 25 hours. Making this design is a little ADHD, as I skipped from one thing to another while waiting to dry, waiting for frosting to chill, and trying to multi-task. This was the process:

I started with the butterfly wings, knowing that Royal icing needs to dry. I drew one wing, then reversed it to make the other side. Second I made the gum paste flowers, for drying reasons, too.

After making the wings and flowers I couldn't really do anything else without the skull for size reference. I always have plans to be very precise in scale work, then end up going with my intuition anyway. The cake flavor is White Russian, as it was going with me to the Henderson Symphony Orchestra boasting Russian composer's works. I thought the flavor was fitting for the venue! I made the cake stacked three layers. I started carving the stack with the jaw line separating from the upper skull. I realized as I was cutting that I needed to off set the cakes to get the angle of the skull. I continued carving the skull, removing cake where the nose holes are, the jaw line opening, and eye holes. After removing the eye holes and looking at the design I realized I needed to build up the cheek bone area. I really learned a lot about skulls. I iced the skull, chilled it, then covered it with home made marshmallow fondant.

Next I made leaves for the three different branches, and the mushrooms.
I used wire and floral tape to make the first vine. For the blue flower branch I used gum paste, and placed the leaves in the vine. I glued down the flowers with water. I made the bird at this time, too. The center of the bird is cake/frosting mix (ala cake pops), then covered in gum paste.

The snake parts are next, formed with the cake/frosting mix and covered in fondant. I used the skull cake for measurement of snake.

Back to the vines: the third vine is gum paste, with water gluing the flowers down, and the leaves placed into the vine. Each vine has a wire in the middle for support.

At this time I had all the parts and pieces, and needed to paint. I painted the Dias De Los Muertos design on the skull; did I mention that I love this design? and the shadows of the skull. Then I painted all the other parts: the leaves, branches, the snake, the bird and mushrooms. I used blue, white and black luster dust to get the different values of blue.

Putting the cake together was mostly easy. The snake parts were already fitted to the skull, and just had to be set on the skull. I used the wire to insert the branches, one at a time. I was very happy with how easily they were to place--until I got to the third branch with the white flowers. This broke right in half. I tried fixing it with gum paste, then freezing it. That worked for about 30 seconds before breaking again. Happily, a skewer was just enough support behind the branch to keep it up-right. I also used a few toothpicks for certain parts, like the bird, and the snake tail.

Next I used Royal icing to attach the wings, and finish the butterfly. Finally, I attached the skull's diamond incrusted grill in the jaw hole.

In the evening I took the cake to the orchestra and it was well loved and enjoyed by everyone! I confess that I feel very proud of this cake. I learned a lot, and created "Beauty Immortal"!