Nosferatu

I started teaching myself to decorate cakes this spring and everyone has been telling me to enter a contest with a cake... this is my first cake contest! I poured over the shirt designs and tried to find something that really caught my eye. I loved the Nosferatu shirt and looking at the design, it all seemed so obvious. It already looked like a cake to me!

I began with box mix dark chocolate. I doctor my mix with extra eggs and extra oil to make them more moist and sturdy. Then I added chocolate chips! nothing better than a little surprise when you take a bite! I didn't have a pan small enough for the size I wanted the top tier to be... but I found this giant mug at the dollar store and I realized I could totally bake a cake in it. When it was done, the cake looked so delicious, I had to keep myself from eating it with a fork right out of the mug!

I made my own marshmallow fondant using powdered sugar, marshmallows, crisco and water. I added light blue food coloring gel to try to match the color of the shirt design. Making marshmallow fondant is messy, but worthwhile because it tastes a million times better than store bought fondant and costs a fraction of what store bought costs.

When the cakes were done, I leveled them with a bread knife and left them to cool. While they cooled, I made my buttercream frosting with butter, crisco, milk and vanilla extract. I stacked my layer cakes, crumb frosted my the whole cakes and let the frosting set up. While they set up, I rolled out my fondant and covered them. Once all three tiers were covered, I stacked them and piped a pearl boarder around them. I thought it would look classy with the design.

I mixed black food color gel into some of the leftover blue fondant and got ready to make my figures. I had printed out a photo of the shirt and had planned on cutting the figures out and laying them on my fondant to trace them out... but I couldn't find scissors anywhere in my house!! How could I have no scissors?? No matter... I covered the page with wax paper and started building the characters on the wax paper, using the picture as a guide. I used my gum paste tools to help shape and mold the figures. Once they were done, I brushed the back of them with piping gel and applied them to the side of the cake. I had to make Nosferatu twice because the first one I made was GIGANTIC and didn't fit onto the tier. Bummer! The hands were super hard to make. I probably spent 20 minutes trying to make those tiny fingers. I still wasn't happy with them when they were done!

To paint the darker blue in the background, I mixed blue coloring gel, high proof vodka, pearl dust and a little powdered sugar and hand painted the details in with a little paint brush. After that, I dusted over the painted areas with a little bit of powdered sugar to take the shine off.

I hand piped the moon, stars and other small details on with white buttercream. I made up some things to put on the back of the cake, mountains, more painted forest and stars to fill up the space, since there was nothing to go on from the shirt design for this.

I think this took, from start to finish around 7 hours to make. Including mixing, baking, making the fondant and frosting... letting the cakes cool... nitpicking at things for at least an hour after it was actually done... I hit tons of snags, like a rip in the fondant on the middle tier... I moved that to the back and covered it later lol... the tiers were leaning to the right, so I had to get a dowel and steady them... my parchment piping bags kept bursting because I'd let them sit for so long between using them... so yeah... there were tons of little things that tried to hold me back, but in the end, I was happy with my results!

I feel so close to this shirt design at this point that I'm kind of upset that I don't own it. Obviously, I'm going to have to buy it now!