The Dummy Cake

For my entrepreneurship class, I'm doing a presentation of my business plan next week (and my business plan is obviously a bakery). I decided to make a fake cake for part of my presentation, and I've been working on that for the past week.

It's a 6 tier square cake covered in marshmallow fondant with royal icing decorations...

And let me tell you, this has been the most painful cake I've ever made.

I don't know if it's because I've had to roll out all that fondant by hand (in addition to actually making the fondant; there's a lot of kneading involved) or because I piped 6 tiers worth of decorations in one sitting, but my muscles are so sore! (I guess it could be because I'm trying to go the gym everyday too...)

Anyway, I'll keep you updated with my progress, but I decided to wait a few days so the muscles in my right arm have time to heal and stop cramping up on me. It seriously felt like I got a Charlie horse in my forearm. Yuck.

But, no pain, no gain. And this cake is going to be totally gorgeous and worth all the trouble :)

Experimenting with Royal Icing

So my goal today was to work on my business plan for entrepreneurship class and write my elevator pitch which is due Monday. But when I started looking up prices for bakeries (which is totally confusing and a lot of work), I got distracted by pretty cake pictures.

After looking at like a billion wedding cakes on Martha Stewart's website, I had to stop looking, and starting doing...something. Anything! I needed to be creative. I considered baking something, but there wasn't enough instant gratification in that, so I whipped up a small batch of royal icing and decided to tackle the Lambeth technique, Oriental string work, and bridgework, and whatever else I could do with royal icing.

Guess what? It was surprisingly a lot easier than I though it would be, but still a) time consuming and b)  I wasn't really shooting for perfection anyway, I just wanted to grasp the basic concepts. If I was trying to be perfect, then I would've been super frustrated. First of all, I can't get my loops to all be consistent sizes. So that's the first thing I'm going to work on. Also, when I make scrolls, it's so hard to go over the lines exactly. And then I kept breaking everything with my clumsy hands. Oh, and I think my icing consistency wasn't stiff enough, since my bridgework was droopy. :(

Anyway, here's some visual evidence of what I did tonight instead of homework:

This is some form of Oriental Stringwork. Thank you to Mel for your tutorial to get me started! (And random C-scrolls!)

Droopy bridgework :(

More stringwork! I love this effect. Gravity defying!

Just fooling around with some icing. Some kind of attempt at Lambeth, I think. I wish I had his book! My inspiration here.

 ...And yes, I realize that I need to dig up my camera and charge the battery because these webcam & camera phone pics just aren't cutting it!