Stephanie’s Cakes

Monkey alert! This cake was a dummy cake (carved styrofoam) for the Birthday Cake contest at the San Mateo County Fair. The cakes are on display for the entire run of the Fair, so I try to use styrofoam as much as possible for fear of real cake settling or falling apart during the week of the Fair. Blech! Still, I make sure my designs are something I could do in real cake - that’s not a rule, but it just seems more in keeping with the spirit of the contest, somehow.

The cake was inspired by a few I’ve seen online, and I added the twist of the monkeys celebrating by dismantling the candles. The monkeys are made out of modelling chocolate, which is lovely stuff - if you’ve ever warmed up a Tootsie Roll and used it to make worms or faces before eating it, you’ve pretty much experienced what it’s like to work with modelling chocolate. It does get good and solid as it cools down, and in my experience you don’t get as much time to make adjustments as you do with fondant because it sets more quickly - which can be a good or bad thing, depending on what you’re trying to make.

The bananas are all hand-piped with yellow buttercream; once the buttercream had set a bit, I painted on the brown banana ends and lines with brown gel coloring. It did bleed a bit as the cakes sat on display, but the effect was still good. If I made this cake for a party, I might make all the bananas out of fondant instead. It would take a while, but it would give the cake great dimension.

This cake, for my husband’s grandmother, was inspired by her love of flowers and the outdoors, complete with a fondant version of her beloved corgi!

Most of the flowers are royal icing, aside from the roses, which are buttercream. It was also my first chance to use wafer paper butterflies, which are really interesting: images of real butterflies are printed with edible ink on rice paper, and you cut them out and brush on a bit of piping gel and edible glitter to make the wings sparkle. Eating one is kind of like eating unflavored cotton candy - they just melt away without a lot of flavor. When done right, the butterflies are very realistic… I need a bit more practice

(click on the images below to enlarge them)