The movie camera cake

Just a note -- the cake archive posts are not in any sort of chronological order. Just whatever I felt like showcasing that week.

This week is one of the most technically complex cakes I have made to date. It was for my husband's 30th birthday (the Guinness cake was for his 29th) and since he's a cinematographer and editor, he asked for a movie camera.

Unfortunately, I do not have fantastic pictures of it because most of the pictures were lost in the great computer crash of 2010.

This is the completed cake.  It's several pieces of cake in varying heights and shapes, covered in fondant and painted black. The silver portions on the camera itself, the slate, and the film reel are all done with gumpaste and painted silver.

 Cake lit up with 30 candles.

 Birthday boy blowing out the cake.

The process was as follows -- I found a couple of images online of movie cameras and asked my husband to select which ones he liked best. I then started with the reels (those are 6" round cakes) and sized the rest of the cake pieces to be proportional to the reels based on the measurements from the images.  Each of the pieces was covered in fondant individually and then painted black using a vodka and black paste icing color mix.

The gumpaste was white, and I used varying sizes of circles to make the knobs.  The square portion on the camera and the reel were done free-hand.  The center of the reel is a disc of gumpaste painted black. The rest of it was colored silver using a vodka and silver dust mix.  The slate is a piece of gumpaste painted black and then I used white royal icing to do the bars at the top and to write Happy Birthday on it.

The cakes themselves were a mix of cupcake recipes scaled up, and a couple sections were from a box mix because I had one recipe that just refused to play nice. (See this post on failure for details.)

All told, I think the cake took about 20 hours over the course of two weeks -- two weeks because the gumpaste needed adequate time for the shapes to dry and then for two or three coats of silver and black to dry. I made the fondant (from the marshmallow recipe) two days before, and the cakes were all done the night before, with the assembly being done partially that night and mostly the next morning.

The most important part though was that my husband was thrilled.  (Of course, last year he just wanted a plain old boring cake, but that's okay!)