My friend Leslie (who you may remember from the White/Brown Sugar-free tartlets) came over Tuesday to make a wedding cake with me! It didn't turn out how we'd planned - but it was about ten hours of fun!
We made a three-layer red velvet cake (I'm going to try to make it less allergenic - it was DELICIOUS), which was a lot of fun, except for the occasional dye spills (sorry mom!).
Here's Leslie making the batter, and the cake sans decoration:
We had planned to cover it in fondant, but we ran into a little bit - actually, about four hours' worth - of trouble in making it, given that we weren't sure how to adapt the recipe to use Agar powder instead of gelatin (vegetarianism isn't usually this hard!). We ended up covering part of the cake in the fondant...stuff... and I painted that, as you can see in the first picture and in some of the following pictures.
After realizing that we just hadn't made the fondant pliable enough, we opted to make buttercream frosting, which we did our best in neatening around the fondant. It was late by that time, and it had been about nine hours, so we were a little tired at this point - but the result was pretty and it was delicious!
It's a cake! The painting was done in black food dye, and yes, those are painted fondant cufflinks on the top!
I would definitely love to give this cake another try in the making, but next time, we need to be sure of how we're going to make and set everything up, and have thicker cake layers. I'd love to do more cake painting - not surprisingly, if you know me, I love details like that - and I think that it would be fun to do that on more of a large canvas. Next time, though, we'll do a different fondant recipe, or maybe marzipan, so that we can actually cover the cake in it - something more pliable! No matter, though, it came out nicely.
It wasn't the most successful experiment I've done, meaning that it didn't go according to plan, but it came out rather prettily and it was absolutely delectable. I brought it out to the block party, where it was a hit, and my other friend Riley downed her slice of cake like it was do or die.
If anyone has suggestions for vegetarian fondant, I'd love to hear them! I'll leave you off here with a close-up of the painted parts. See you at the next challenge!
