RV Cake

Our family loves to camp.  We started with the basic tent, moved up to a pop up tent trailer and just recently made the move up to an RV.  This was a LONG process - over 9 months.  I think we seriously had our RV sales guy thinking about running when he saw us coming.  Anyway - in order to thank Rex for all of his patience with us, I decided to make him a special cake of his own.

I have to say - I am NOT a big fan of carved cakes.  They get all crumby when you carve them and I have had troubles in the past with putting fondant over them.  This one, was actually a dream!

I started with a 1/2 sheet of triple chocolate fudge cake, split in in fourths and stacked it (with SMBC in between).  I then started angling the front with my bread knife, a little at a time.  I think I actually ended up making about 5 cuts before I got the angle right.  Once that was done, I crumb coated the whole cake with SMBC and then chilled it in the fridge.  While that was happening, I made the pine trees out of sugar cones and green royal icing and let them dry.  I also made the wheels, and the trailer hitch out of black fondant and let them all dry as well.  The hitch I put in toothpicks on the ends, so that I would be able to attach it to the trailer easily once I was done.

Remember the graduated color cake?  Remember how I made A LOT of green fondant.  Well, I used that to cover my cake board.  Things always happen for a reason.  :-)

Once the cake was chilled, I covered the entire thing with white fondant.  Once it was smoothed, I used a picture of our new RV and copied it as best as I could with the accent pieces.  The graphics were painted on with gel food coloring.  Then it was put it all on the cake board.  I had some leftover candy rocks from a golfing cake I had done, so I put them in a circle with pretzel sticks - voila!  Instant fire.

Rex loved his cake, we love our RV - life is good! 

Graduated Colors

It seems like the latest trend in cake decorating has been graduated colors.  I have always wanted to try this, but thought it would be very time consuming and difficult.  While the first part is true - it IS time consuming, it really wasn't that difficult at all. 

Green is my favorite color, so I thought I would experiment with that.  The trick to doing the graduated colors is pretty simple - Thanks to Half Baked - a caking blog I follow - I too was able to figure out how to do this!  Basically you start with the darkest color you want.  Not the way I would have attempted it, but it makes sense - you do your first bottom row in the dark, then add some white fondant to it.  You then have the next step in color and it is not too drastic of a change. 

One hint though - the base color, before you add the white, halve the amount.  Otherwise, you end up using A LOT of fondant that you don't really need to and have a ton of color left over.  Don't ask me how I know this!  LOL 

My topper for this cake is simply a pear.  I considered using a Granny Smith apple, keeping it in the color scheme, but decided I liked the color and shape of  the pear better. 

Stained Glass & Shipping a Cake

My son turned 22 this month and all he wanted for his birthday was a cake created by mom.  Only one problem, my son lives in Alaska.  Sorry kiddo - no can do!  But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered... can I do it?  Why not try?  The worst that would happen is that he would end up with a box of cake crumbs. 

If I was going to ship this to Alaska - a buttercream cake was ruled out right off the bat.  Fondant, it is!  No pieces that stand up.  This needs to be a smooth cake.  I saw this cake - done much more professionally - on a blog site that I was browsing through.  Ah hah!  That's it - smooth fondant, but lots of color. 

This cake is a triple chocolate fudge cake that I crumb coated with swiss meringue butter cream.  Once it was chilled, I covered the cake in white fondant and smoothed it.  From there, I used a black edible marker and drew on the koi and the lily pads. 

I purchased from the craft store a set of paint brushes.  I used a stipple brush to do "paint" the light blue food coloring gel on the cake.  Let dry.  Switch brushes and color, paint in and let dry.  Repeat until all of the cake is colored in.  Once it is completely dry - I outlined everything in black food gel. 

To ship:  I covered the cake in saran wrap and froze it.  Once it was frozen solid, I wrapped it in bubble wrap and placed it in a sturdy box.  I filled the box with more bubble wrap, sealed it with duct tape and sent it off.  It was sent overnight and made it all in one piece!  Happy Birthday to my son!