Double Chocolate Cake with Vanilla and Chocolate Buttercream filling

covered in Vanilla Marshmallow Fondant with fondant candy accents

as well as a sugarpaste orchid!

This week brings a birthday cake for a repeat client. This is fun and challenging at the same time. When you have created something original for someone and then they come back and want the same or better, well, it's exciting, flattering and all of a sudden a huge challenge to top what you did the year before! As with the last cake I created for this client I had full autonomy when it came to the creation. This is also a double edged sword. What is fun about that is the freedom to come up with a design that you think will please the client but what is nerve wracking is not knowing you had succeeded till they come to pick up the cake. As with last year, this year's cake was love at first sight for the client and tons of fun for me to make. Definitely a Win-Win senario!

The "secret" this week has to do with all the circles you see surrounding the middle of this cake. They are pure fondant. Usually when making hard decorations for a cake you need to either use sugarpaste or mix sugarpaste or tylose into the fondant so it dries hard and sturdy. This, pretty much, makes them inedible. You "could" eat them but you probably wouldn't want to due to the taste which is a bit like biting into cardboard. Because I didn't want the client to have to remove each and every circle before serving I decided to make the circles out of pure fondant and then let them dry up. This means preparing for it days ahead and then letting them sit out lightly covered to keep out any debris or dust for at least 2 days or longer to get them hard enough to use on the cake. When they are totally dry they become a sort of candy. Very similar to the candy used to make "candy cigarettes". The great thing is that they can then be served with the cake rather than removed before serving.

In the upcoming week I will be using the extra circles and dots to create a completely different look for my next demo cake! The design of this cake actually came to me last night in my dreams. I knew I wanted to use circles and dots for the next demo cake so I cut them out at the same time as the ones I needed for this weeks cake but I had no clue at all what I was going to use them for until this morning. I popped out of bed and grabbed my sketch pad and colored pencils and drew it all out! Inspiration for cake designs often hits like this and I keep a sketch pad of some size with me everywhere I go just in case. You just never know when you will see a pattern that will make a cake design pop into your head!

See you next Sunday!

Cat