Reviews, Recipes and Miscellany

Saturday, October 05, 2013

Miscellaneous: Barnyard Cake


This few weeks has been full of cake- first this lovely barnyard cake and then a large buttercream school bus cake. This was for a little girl Sonia and she loves animals. So I started shaping figurines like sheep and ducks and making carrots. 




When I completed my menagerie with a cow, pig, a basket of apples and a haystack, I decided to add some corn and flowers to fill in the spaces. It was starting to look pretty busy on it's 8 inch cake base! I was oddly, most proud of my apples, forming the little dimples and ridges characteristic of an apple shape, isn't actually that easy!



Rolling out the fondant for the cake wound up being the most challenging part. We chose a pale yellow colour, rather than an aqua blue, because we thought it would be a more cheerful colour and complement the busy surface of the cake. After a few false starts, the fondant started to split and show air holes, I'm not sure if this is due to the colouring having been liquid colouring, or whether it's because the texture of fondant changes as it's rolled out a few times. We also don't use any gum reagents with our fondant, which is usually what is added to keep it soft and pliable. I added a hand-painted, wood textured barn, a fence and hedges to the cake before assembling our barnyard. 




The cake was four layers of lemon-blueberry in an 8 inch size, almost 4 inches in height and sandwiched with lemon buttercream and lemon curd. We cut out patchwork blocks to spell out the birthday girl's name and attached it to the side of the cake. One day, I thought, I'd like to make a bizarre Rent-style birthday cake, you know, purple pigs and pink ducks, blue sheep, green eggs and ham. For a very special child. I was pretty proud of this cute cake, it was beautiful in its detail and required a fair bit of planning and thought. I hope she liked it too! 


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