For Grace's birthday this year she wanted an Eiffel Tower theme. Jen found this great example of a tower made out of sugar wafers and I thought it was a fabulous idea and we could recreate it no problem and I would document the cake process in photos because I've not done so before. Well...the cake went fine, it was the tower that was the problem. Here's the original, and here's the photo documentary:
Everything started out just fine. The usual cake build - I thought I should capture a picture of the crumb coat stage because it used to make me sooooo nervous how awful the cake looked at this stage:
And while that dried and sealed in all the crumbs. I got to work constructing the eiffel tower components. At this stage, everything appears to be going great even though I massacred a number of hot pink sugar wafers before I got the angles right.
So now the frosting for the tower is drying, and I can switch back to decorating the cake. I got a coat of white frosting all over the cake, then added the black design work. On the top I was thinking the loops had an overall french feel, and then on the sides I started an alternating spiral and dot pattern design. After about half of the cake I decided the simple spirals weren't quite enough, so I added more frills and 'legs' to the spirals so they had more of a filigree/ironwork look.
I also left space for a medallion on the front with a big 'G' for Gracie. Everything was piped with a pencil tip except the border along the edge of the plate, that was done with a star tip.
The next step was the hot pink accents. This is what would take the cake from kind of grown-up in black and white back to a kid level with some playful accents. I left plenty of room on the top of the cake to highlight the tower...darn it. The flowers were all made with the 5 petal drop flower tip.
So the design of the cake itself went very smoothly. I was happy with how it turned out and ready to finish the top. This is the point where the documentation stopped and the swearing began. Either my frosting glue needed to set up overnight or my wafer construction was too heavy, but when I flipped the base piece over the legs immediately collapsed. I swore.
Then I tried to put it together again. And swore again when it failed a second time.
I didn't have much time before the birthday party so I started looking for a plan b- I didn't have any candy melts in the house, which would have made a good, strong glue (and just recently I *had* pink ones but I used them up.) So chocolate was the next best I option. I melted some chocolate and used it to reinforce the legs.
This appeared to work... I set the top piece on it and started piping some black dots to cover the chocolate and liven up the tower - compared the rest of the cake it looked a little bland just pink.... until everything collapsed again - this time not only the legs, but the mitred corner for the bottom edge fell apart too.
I dissected all the bits and realized that residual frosting might have been what kept the chocolate, which had appeared very solid, from holding the piece together. So I scraped off every bit of frosting I could find, re-cut a few pieces, and slathered the whole base in chocolate and tried to get the legs back on. Then I threw the whole thing in the freezer to set as more swearing ensued and I called Jen to let her know there might not be a tower on the cake.
She said, ok - if not, just bring the rest of the wafers back and Grace can try to build one. Ha ha - I'd killed all the wafers. There was only one, crumble-edged wafer left.
When I was dressed in clothes that didn't have powdered sugar and frosting all over them, and had everything gathered for the party I took the tower out of the freezer, tossed it into an empty cake pan and took the whole lot over to the party to see if I could pull it together. Amazingly, perhaps with birthday girl magic, it did hold once I got to the party:
I attempted to pull the heavy chocolate layer into the design with more black piping, and hopefully for a group of kids I pulled it off.
0 comments:
Post a Comment