However, the cake we want for her birthday will involve fondant, something I had never really worked with before. It's going to be something along the lines of this:
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The cake itself is decorated with fondant and frosting, and the figurines are store bought (I'm not going to kid myself and even attempt to make the characters out of fondant). The '3' is probably a decorated sugar cookie.
Anyway, I wanted to practice first, being a fondant virgin. We were doing a little celebration at work for a coworker's birthday. I had come across this Nerdy Nummies video a few weeks ago and wanted to try it. A grumpy cat cake was perfect, since we refer to my boss as grumpy cat. My final product didn't come out *quite* like Rosanna's, but for my first attempt at really decorating a cake/working with fondant, I'll take it.
I used this recipe for the cake, this one for the sugar cookie ears, this one for the vanilla buttercream and this one for the chocolate buttercream (on the ears).
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| Work in progress |
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| Just another angle - after successfully transporting it to work |
Because I've never worked with it before, I used store bought fondant. I didn't think trying to make my own without having an idea of the consistency and what it's like to work with was a good idea. The Fondarific
brand had pretty good reviews and seemed to be the best tasting of store bought fondants. To color the vanilla buttercream and fondant, I used AmeriColor Gel Food Coloring
. The fur was done with Wilton Disposable Decorating Bags
and Wilton Tip #233
.Some things I learned/need to remember for next time:
- I broke this up into stages (frostings and sugar cookie dough one day, cake and baking the sugar cookies the next, and frosting/decorating/making the face the last). This was definitely the way to go. I spent hours working on it each day - there's no way I could have done it in one day.
- I cut circles out of parchment paper to line the bottom of the pan, so the cake wouldn't stick, but forgot to grease the sides. This isn't a new concept to me, I've made probably hundreds of cakes by now, I'm just bad at remembering this part. I ran a knife along the side of the pan to get the cake out, but there was some sticking, so I had to cover up some flaws with extra frosting.
- I've also insulated the sides of the pan by wrapping the pan in aluminum foil in the past, which is supposed to help prevent doming. I didn't do that this time. My cakes didn't inflate too much, but I'll remember to wrap the pans next time anyway.
- The gel food coloring is INTENSE. I put a few drops of brown into my 3-4 cups of vanilla buttercream thinking I'd get the light tan color - nope, it was light brown. I had to correct it by throwing it back in the mixer and adding more butter, sugar and cream. It was still a little too dark but I had run out of butter and didn't want to go overboard with the sugar and cream. Next time I'll start with a teeny tiny amount of food coloring and work from there.
- This is specific to this cake, but in the video, it didn't look like she did a crumb layer before frosting the sides of the cake. When I tried just piping the 'fur' right on the cake, it didn't stick to the sides very well. Adding a thin layer of frosting first made it much easier.
- I was a little prissy with working the gel into the fondant at first. I was afraid it would stain my hands and I'd have rainbow colored fingers for days. So I put the fondant into a Ziploc bag, added the food coloring and tried kneading it through the bag. Didn't work too well, so I had to just dive in. It really didn't stain though, the color all came off my hands after a couple washings.
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| I had extra everything, so I made little Grumpy Cat cupcakes. By this point it was like 11 pm on my last night of baking/assembling and my enthusiasm was waning so these were done quickly. |
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