This spotlight is more than spotlighting a cake it’s spotlighting a whole wedding!  Cake friend Pam, who spent time last year helping to organise her oldest daughter’s wedding. Aside from organising, hosting and catering most of the wedding, Pam stretched herself even further by making the Wedding Cake as well!

The cake was dark chocolate mud cake with chocolate ganache (which is posted in the blog and forum’s recipe sections – very popular!) Pam says:

“My inspiration was the wedding dress, but because I was doing so much for the rest of the wedding I needed a design that did not require copious amounts of time and effort…. I feel the top tier (which was two round polystyrene dummies, glued together, carved to shape and then sanded smooth) was not quite correct in proportion to the rest of the cake, it really was a little bit big.”

I say Pam, we are our own worst enemies and I think that seeing the Photo of month is based on views by others that not everyone agrees with you! :mrgreen:

Pam made the buttons using a Daisy centre mould and also hand made the pearls. Keep your eyes peeled as next week we will post the tutorial with pictures showing her process for making the pearls!

Photos courtesy of Pam

‘Caitlyn’s Cupcake Cake’ is our Cake Spotlight by cake friend cakechick. She describes:

The cake itself was a white chocolate and strawberry swirl, layered with white chocolate ganache. It is 2 x 9 inch round cakes staked on top of each other (about 3 – 3.5 inches high each) and then tapered at the sides and rounded at the top. I iced the whole lot in white fondant and then I cut out the pink icing and draped it over the top. The fairies were inspired by a picture I saw on the internet. I used a sugarcraft gun to make the hair, legs and arms but I couldn’t get the wings to stay on they kept sliding down the back so I ended up pulling some petals off some artificial frangipani’s I had. Finally the letters the fairies are holding were dipped in edible glitter. The cake was for a customer, she previously ordered a Christening Cake from me.”

Thank you cakechick for that great inspiring description, nice last minute save with the fairy wings, when all else fails run around the house and see what you can find!

This stunning Ballet Slipper Cake was done by one of our cake friend Toni, who is an Aussie living in Italy. The beautiful simple whiteness shows off the stunningly coloured ballet slippers.

The cake is a dummy as it is for a Fashion Trade Fair in Florence.

Toni explains how she made this beautiful creation:

I order the dummy’s here from a huge polystyrene factory… I just call up, give measurements for what I need, and I can collect the dummy’s the next day. The tiers are 25cm, 20cm and 10cm.

I first attached the white chocolate fondant to the poly dummy’s using a strong glue. The bottom tier was then glued to the plate. Each tier was then glued to on top of each other.

I pre-prepared balls of each colour I would be using by using paste colours with the white chocolate fondant. I then made 5 pairs of each colour. The weather has been in the mid 30’s and gumpaste is definitely much better for these molds. But because I needed so many shoes, I didn’t have enough gumpaste, which is why I used the fondant.

Due to hot weather, the fondant was very sticky.. so pushing it into mold, was a PITA!!! I almost had to turn the mould inside out to get the fondant into the deep edges. The mold then went into the fridge for about 5 min, this helped stiffen the fondant and allowed them to pop out easily. All the ballet slippers were placed on a baking tray, and dusted with ivory lustre dust, before being stuck to the dummy cakes with a strong glue. This seemed to take forever as I completed one tier at a time.

The final touch was a cream satin ribbon around the top of each tier and the arranged shoes on the top tier. This has been my most commented cake so far!

Here you can see the ballet slipper mould, next to the hand it’s not as big as you’d think, still for 40 pairs of shoes, that’s a lot of work!

Pictures courtesy of Toni

This cake spotlight is by our cake friend fttk also known as Tania! She’s taken the time to give a very detailed explanation of how she completed the cake and all it’s amazing elements. Read on.

The cake was a raspberry chocolate mud cake which I covered in brown colour fondant. I do not ganache my cakes so I do two thin layers of fondant to cover my cakes. Once I had completed the second layer, I immediately use the patchwork cutter basketweave embosser to create the basket look. It is a bit fiddly trying to match up the impressions but it doesn’t take too long. Then using the same brown fondant, I used my sugar gun with the large rope attachment, to make the rope that went around the bottom of the cake. It had to be done in two parts and I later hid the joins on the sides with buttons. I then went around the top of the basket and made a rope again and using glue and pins, placed the rope on the top. I only used the pins under the rope to hold it up until it dried overnight. I then removed all the pins, and went ahead and started making patterned fabric and ribbons for the top of the basket.

With the red ribbon, I used my ribbon cutter with a straight edge and then using embossing sticks made a flower pattern on the ribbon. I then used my stitching tool to make the edges look like they were sewn. With the two tone violet and white fabric, I used my ribbon cutter to cut thin strips of rolled out fondant for each colour and then placed them together and using my rolling pin, rolled over them to join the fondant strips together. Some of the fabric was cut using a wavy edge on my ribbon cutter and some pieces I embossed with cutters to form patterns and then again I used my stitching tool to give a sewn effect. Some fabric was made with fondant and some with flower paste. I draped the fabric/ribbons as I went along and tried to create a draping effect over the basket. This was allowed to dry overnight before placing heavier items on top.

The thimble, scissors, buttons, pins, needle, pin cushion, cotton reels and tape measure were made several weeks before.

To make the thimble I used grey flower/modelling paste and pushed it into a real thimble dusted with cornflower to get the indented impression. Then I pulled it out and went over the indenting with a toothpick to enhance it. I cut a tiny thin strip and glued it to the edge. Once it had dried I covered it with silver powder mixed with rose spirit. As the silver powder will come off and get onto absolutely everything, once it dried I covered it in leaf glaze to seal it. I used a patchwork cutter for the scissors and again used grey flower/modelling paste and repeated the process I used for the thimble.

The needles were made free hand by using grey modeling paste and making a hole with a blade and the pins were also made free hand with grey modeling paste and coloured fondant for the ends. The grey was covered in silver and glaze. The pin cushion was made by rolling out fondant mixed with gum trag and leaving it very thick and using a heart cutter to make the shape. I then pinched the edges together and used a garret frill cutter to make the frill from modelling paste, then I frilled the edges slightly with a toothpick. I then glued it on and supported it with pins. Once dry, I removed the pins and glued a flower on at the end where the frill joined. I then poked holes in the pin cushion with a pin and glued my handmade pins in place.

The cotton reels were made from ivory fondant mixed with gum trag. I used circle cutters for the top and bottom parts and rolled a fat sausage for the middle part. I glued them together and let them dry. Once dry I used my sugar gun with a variety of fondant colours and made the thread by putting glue on the reel and rolling the thread on.

For the buttons, I used fondant and all sorts of small cutters and piping tips to cut out various shapes in all sorts of colours and made holes in them using a very fine piping tip and a toothpick.

To make the tape measure, I used modelling paste, rolled out thinly and cut into a long strip using the ribbon cutter. I rolled it up and left the end slightly unrolled and made a hole using a piping tip in the end, like the real ones. I then allowed it to dry before painting the end silver using the above method and once dry I painted on the lines and numbers using a paint brush and black gel paste mixed with rose spirit to aid in drying.

Finally, the writing was made with FMM tappits and flower paste.

Pictures courtesy of Tania

This beautiful Peter Rabbit Cake is our first cake spotlight, it just exudes beautifully that Beatrix Potter feel, and transport you back to your childhood!

This beautiful cake is an 8 inch round fruit cake covered in marzipan and then white sugarpaste (equivalent of fondant in Oz). The board is 14 inches and also covered in white sugarpaste.

The cake is based on a Debbie Brown design.

The animal figures are made from modelling paste and hand painted with a mixture of food colour and water.

The backgrounds are hand painted with a mixture of food colour mixed with cooled boiled water used to create the stunning water colour effect.

The cake was made by one of our English cake friends, Flirtygirty, who made the cake for her Godson as his Christening gift.

We would like to thank Flirtygirty for sharing this beautiful gift with us!

Pictures courtesy of Flirtygirty