New Challenges

This cake was full of new challenges for me.  Luckily, I have good and understanding friends who will let me experiment on their cakes.  I'll walk you through it, ok?  Not that you care, but I do, and this is my blog. :)

Challenge number 1:  The hibiscus flowers.  If you google how to make those, they will tell you to special order special tools to make them. I didn't want to to do that, so I combined all of the ideas I saw into one I knew I could do. I realize that a professional baker would make them look more realistic, but since the rest of the cake hardly looks realistic, I figure it works.

Challenge number 2: Making the Happy Birthday sign. I just don't have enough experience with gumpaste/fondant to know the best way to make the sign.  Now that I've made that one, I have some ideas on how to improve it.

Challenge number 3: Making the girl. I have never made a person out of fondant before and really wasn't sure of the best way to go about it. I got to make this little gal twice because she was too long the first time.

Challenge number 4: Painting the sunrise on the top tier. I know you are all asking yourselves, "That's a sunrise"?  Yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. I'm not so artistic and don't know how to paint at all. I watched a bunch of tutorials on youtube, but they still didn't seem to help. (I plan on taking a painting class some time in hopes that it will help me with future cakes.)

Challenge number 5: Making the coral.  I'm kind of the most proud of the coral. Underneath all that royal icing are small grape stems. The coral took a lot of patience and faith that it would look good. I may have yelled at the kids a time or two while I was making it. They kept hovering waiting for me to give them a glob of royal icing to eat.

Not a challenge:  Even though it was a first for me, making the seashells was not a challenge. I just used a chocolate mold and I have used chocolate molds before. Just not a seashell one, but that makes no difference. :)

Overall, this was a very fun cake to think up and create. I hope the birthday girl likes it, because I sure do. I'm usually quite critical of every cake I make, but I really am proud of this one. (Don't worry, I can still  point out the MULTIPLE flaws with it, but as James always assures me, you probably won't notice them like I do.)