Kyoto

I totally fell in love with this t-shirt! I love the sense of movement and elegance of the dancer. And that my friends, is where I should have stopped. :-) Beautiful t-shirt, but making it into cake form was a huge challenge! I had already decided that I wanted to do a 3D cake. I've never sculpted anything before so every knife stroke had me on edge...would this be the one slice that would make everything fall apart???? I started by baking four cake rounds in cinnamon cream flavor. They were sandwiched with a vanilla buttercream. I carved the skirt base out of cake, layered on buttercream and then covered it in fondant. I really wanted to capture a sense of movement in the skirt. I then painted on the designs with food icing and lots of clenched teeth :-) This cake took all day, mainly because I spent so much time looking at the picture of the t-shirt and looking at the pile of cake scraps in front of me, wondering how to connect the two. I made a bold choice (or crazy depending on how you look at it!) and decided I would crumble all the rest of the cake, mix with a little buttercream and make a kind of cake clay. I moulded the torso, arms and head, put them in the freezer to harden a little and stabilized the torso with pretzel sticks. I covered the disembodied limbs (speaking of which, I didn't warn hubby so he opened the freezer to see a kind of cake CSI scene!) with fondant and then started the construction. Cake clay is not as stable as you might think, huh, who'd have guessed? So it took a little longer than expected, but finally the last hair was on her head, the last finger detail done. All except for the fan which is piped out it chocolate and set before placing it in the hand of the dancer.
Just enough time for a little sigh before we carved in and devoured some cake - delicious and it was super fun to have made my first 3D cake: Thanks Threadcakes!