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 is a dummy (styrofoam!) fondant-covered wedding cake made for the San Mateo County Fair. It’s the first time I’ve made a wedding cake for the fair; usually I enter the birthday or holiday categories because they give me a chance to try out designs that are a little quirkier than usual. But now that I’ve taken a gumpaste flower class, I decided to refine the cake I made for class and turn it into a wedding cake. It went over well - good enough for a blue ribbon!

There’s a height limit in the fair rules that makes it hard to do a three-tier wedding cake, but maybe if I did a miniature cake it would fit the rules… hmm…. and I would still like to try a design that’s more in the Art Nouveau style… maybe next year…