February 20, 2012

80th Birthday cakes

For Chris' grandmother's 80th birthday, in 2009, I made four cakes.  Originally when I volunteered to make the cakes, I was going to take the week between Christmas and New Year's off and have plenty of time. Then I was laid off, so I'd still have time, and then I found a job and they asked me to start on the 29th of December, so I ended up doing a couple of late nights that week to get all of the cakes done.

The rectangular cakes are sour cream fudge (minus the coffee due to an allergy in the family), with chocolate buttercream in the middle.  The round cake was both sour cream fudge and the chocolate cake recipe on the  box of Hershey's special dark cocoa because I had a cake fail to turn out correctly.

The cakes are all something related to Chris' grandmother's life. First up, the CU logo. This was done with the technique of tracing the image with piping gel in reverse and then laying that onto the cake and icing over the gel.

She's also an avid bridge player, so this cake pays tribute to that. The card suits were all done using a large cookie cutter to put the outline on the cake and then piping that in with a star tip.


And she likes to golf, so I made a golf course.  The brighter green is the grass tip, with a river of blue frosting and the sand trap is toasted coconut.


I also made a golfer out of gumpaste. The golfer looks more like Mr. Bill than the birthday girl, but it was my first attempt at figure making, so I can't say that it turned out too badly.


Last but not least, this cake uses royal icing drop flowers and the vine outlines were done with a press kit I have that's scroll work. The letters are also from the letter press -- much too neat to be my own handwriting.  Unfortunately, you can see where the bars that hold the letters ended up a little too deep in the cake.


The cake boards are all standard cake boards, covered in gold wrapping paper with a layer of plastic wrap atop that to make them food safe.  I thought the gold was much nicer than the standard white cake board, and doing it with plastic wrap and wrapping paper is cheaper than the food-safe foil paper sold for that purpose.



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