Topsy Turvy Cakes and the Whole Sordid Tale

First of all, this is a long and potentially boring post. If you just want to see the finished product without all the gory details, just go down to my cake blog instead! The link is right above my other blog list, under all the pictures to the left.

For those of you staying on this flight, there is good news and bad news. Which do you want first? I guess I'll start with the good news. Here are some pictures of the cake after I was finally done stressing over it:





The bad news is that I am afraid it very well may have crashed before it even made it to the party. For some reason the anchoring of it wasn't right, and one of the angles was off - so the middle tier ended up getting squished, and I had to put a suran-wrap girdle around it to keep it from falling completely apart.


You can see how the fondant got all rippled when the cake started caving under the weight of the top layer.


You will also notice cracks all over my morbid black fondant - I suppose since it was for a 50th birthday party I could say it was all part of the scheme - wrinkles and cracks and all that - but I'd be lying!


And I will say I sacrificed stability for taste - pumpkin cake, though scrumptious and infinitely better than boring spice cake - was not the sturdiest cake to make this out of. After having a very difficult time getting the fondant on the top tier to smooth down (and failing) I decided to try a new tack with the middle tier - wrapping the fondant up from the bottom instead.


Yeah. Didn't work. Still extremely difficult to flatten out - I ended up making little tucks and actually pinching the fondant up and cutting it with scissors. The marbelized look comes from mixing black & white fondant together.


I guess the ripples just add to the effect. Still, as a perfectionist, I was miffed by this detail.

Here I am stressing when the middle tier didn't go in like butter (the way it did in my mind).


Thanks to my mom, I was able to shimmy it into the other cake using my spatula like a shoe horn:


.....and here I am freaking out when I got the top tier in and the cake didn't look whimsical enough for me:


.....and here I am walking away from it before I grabbed a chainsaw and took my frustration out.


The moral of the story is:

1. Don't do these kind of cakes anymore.
2. If I do one of these cakes again, make it out of super-sturdy pound cake or the like.
3. Pay more attention to my angles and calculate the added thickness of fondant when cutting a hole for the next cake to anchor into.
4. Anchor with hidden pillars and decorator plates rather than cardboard and skewers.
5. Center the cakes on each other rather than flirting with the edges.
6. Charge an arm and a leg - and possibly a torso and an ear or two.
7. Now I can finally get some sleep.
8. I have phenomenal friends and family who believe in me and are supportive and encouraging (thanks again, Carissa!)