Guinness cake

As promised, Mondays will feature various cakes I have made and I will talk about the cake, the lessons I learned, and the techniques I used.

First up, an early experiment in fondant. This one was for my husband's birthday, and he's a huge fan of Guinness.

The cake itself is this recipe and I made two batches of it in 9x13 pyrex pans. The fondant is this marshmallow fondant. This recipe is my go-to fondant recipe. Even people who don't like fondant like this recipe.

You can see here, looking at the top of the cake, where I have a line from rolling out the fondant across the gap in my table. Lesson 1: have a big enough surface to roll the fondant on.

You probably also notice that the color is uneven. I do not own an airbrush, and because the color had to be partially up the cake and I was not confident in my abilities to line the fondant up, I chose to paint the color on instead.  I was using a foam brush, I believe, and the color was thinned out with vodka.  I have since switched over to bristle brushes for painting and get somewhat better results. Some day I will buy an airbrush, but I'm just not making enough cakes right now to justify the expense.

The balls around the bottom of the cake are just there to hide the edge. You can also see from the above angle that I didn't get the bottom of the pint glass quite even. I was trying to match the contours of the Guinness glasses we have.

However, I am rather proud of the Guinness logo. It was done by printing out a large scale version of the logo, then carefully cutting that into a stencil. Once the stencil was complete, I carefully filled it in with yellow buttercream, let it set and then lifted the stencil straight up.  The detail is not as clean as if I had piped it, but I find it works admirably for designs without a lot of fussiness.

Stay tuned -- in the weeks ahead you'll see the cake I made as a follow-up for my husband's 30th birthday -- it involves a lot more fondant and shaping. Next week, though, I will showcase the rest of the cakes I made for this birthday celebration, and it was also my oldest daughter's 1st birthday.