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Mad Hatter wedding cake with fondant icing and custom toppers!
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Food > Mad Hatter wedding cake with fondant icing and custom toppers! by
jesse
Mad Hatter cakes (like what we wanted for our wedding) were around $3000, custom toppers were around $800, and a rotating display platter is $50. We only had $5000 dollars for the whole wedding. So we decided we should MAKE our CAKE and eat it too. This is approximatly how to do it if you want to. Our cake cost less than $100 to make.
We needed to make the body of the cake weeks ahead of time and in impossible shapes as you can understand...so we chose to make all but the very top tier of the cake out of foam. Here I have glued some thick pieces of hard styrofoam together into a large cube and have begun sculpting with a big bread knife. The final level would be made a couple of days preceeding the event, but match the rest of the cake because we saved some of the special icing known in the industry as fondant.
Brenda takes a turn hacking at the form. Im going to have to say, it's not really that easy to carve perfect shapes in large foam. Unless you are a sculptor, I wouldn't attempt this project.
For finer sculpting I created a rasp by bending a hacksaw blade into a loop and securing it with a visegrip.
Here is the finished styrofoam form. One last level will go atop this, but it will be real cake. Afterall, no one will notice if we cut the cake from the top, then leave the rest alone. They didn't notice, but we told them anyhow bacause so many people asked about its origins.
Notice the dowel, it runs down the entire cake holding everything secure and in the appropriate spot. It got cut off just above this layer in the final product.
Fondant cake icing is a really cool way of doing a cake. We needed to practice this extremly advanced level of cake making, so we did a sample cake. We colored a handfull of fondant blue and twisted it into some white, resulting in this marbling effect. You need special dye for fondant. Check out JoAnn Craft stores or other similar craft and fabric chains for all the raw materials.
Fondant is rolled to 1/8th inch to 1/4 inch thickness and quickly flopped over the cake, then smoothed with rollers and burnishers (spoons) untill it's fitted tight on the shape.
This is pretty much how we did the big cake, except the fondant had to be put on to each tier in muliple pieces then joined with moisture and lots of meticulous burnishing. (Fondant does not stick to styrofoam, but it does stick to plaster very well. So, we iced the styrofoam with plaster then sanded it to a perfect shape and smoothness before we applied the fondant.)
Here is the finished practice cake.
SO here is the big one getting all decked out in fondant. It was very hard.
On go the stripes...you get the back of the strips of your second color wet then they just sugarweld to the first layer.
It's very exciting to finish the sections because its so friggin' tedious.
We tried to alternate base colors and stripes. We went with pink on the bottom, next was orange then orange again the top would be pink. The pattern here PinkOrangeOrangePink made us laugh...P.O.O.P.
Now I needed to make the toppers. They needed to look a lot like Brenda and I. So I took 5 pictures of my face from different angles. (This is just my left side obviously.)
I used the angles to model my face, I did the same with Brenda's face.
I sculpted the toppers by making a steel wire armature, and wrapped tinfoil around it. Then I coated that with plasticine (Sculpey or Fimo). All these layers were placed in exact thicknesses and proportions so that the sculpey was never thicker than 1/2 inch, making the baking part more successfull.
I knew what we were going to be wearing and the models reflect this. Our heads are unproportionally large, this enables us to see face detail, while keeping the models small.
Then painting ensued...after baking that is. Acrylic paint was the medium.
Now you see kinda what they will look like done. I made tiny glasses out of 60 gague wire. They were the correct shape and proportion as our real glasses. I painted them to match as well.
The base is made from the back of the housing for a fan motor, painted. My mom gave that to me. The ventelation spaces in the housing were filled in with movie light gels. LED's were added under it so that, when turned on, they shined colored light up onto the figures.
Here is the top tier being introduced to the rest of the cake. It all sits on is a lazy susan with a low motor attached at the back, causing the whole cake to rotate once a minute.
Pic of me shoving skewers into the cake (pointy side up) to keep the top piece from sliding off. The little girl to my left is Alison, Brenda's cousin and our flower girl.
Traditional fondant borders are normally tiny rolled up balls. They work well to disguise all the crappy edges. In this photo you can see the motor that rotated the cake.
And here it is all done. It is the best wedding cake I have ever seen.
A year later we pulled it from the freezer and tried to eat the rest.
But it was all hard and stale.
So we tried to microwave it back to its supple goodness, but it just made it worse.
So we pretended to like it for the photos.
But because it was unkind to our mouths we stabbed it.
And we threw it away. The whole bottom part of the cake (the styrofoam part) was also thrown away much earlier. For a while we contemplated making it into a lamp...a lamp that melts during the summer and gets sticky and collects cat hair and dust...no we threw it away.
But we kept the toppers.
The End
Posted by natetrue 1 year ago ( 09-Dec-2006 12:49:19 )
Posted by jeffneal 1 year ago ( 24-Jan-2007 21:52:12 )
Posted by sykora 35 weeks ago ( 10-Sep-2007 07:01:39 )