Sometimes you’ve just got to go big…Part 1

Have you ever bitten off more than you chew? I really thought I'd done that on one of my recent cake adventures.

I work in a government office and deal with large commercial vehicles all day long. I'll admit it's a funny job for a girl who really only knows where to put the gas in the car. Stacy, one of my colleagues, also likes decorating cakes and when our senior manager announced her retirement for the end of April, our brains got dreaming about what kind of cake we could create together for the celebration.

Since we work with government regulations about trucks all day long and that’s what our manager had been doing for approximately 30 years, we quickly decided it would be a blast to make a transport truck out of cake. We figured there could be more than 100 people show up for the open house that was being planned so we decided to go with the "go big, or go home" perspective on cake decorating.

After a trip to a second hand store to find some toy trucks we could use for parts, we had to figure out how we could make tires. We've watched all the cake shows, so what else could we do but make a silicone mold and make chocolate tires. The first trick was finding some place local that sold the right materials for a food safe silicone mold. I struck out on a bunch of phone calls to local craft, kitchen and restaurant supply stores but one suggested a hobby shop who then suggested one of my dad’s favourite stores Industrial Plastics & Paint.  Not where I’d have ever thought to look for cake decorating supplies but they had exactly what we needed. 

I went with a liquid silicone and Easymold was great to work with though we learned some important lessons about really making sure the tire was solidly attached to the bottom of the plastic tub that we were using to hold the liquid silicone while it dried and that it may take longer to dry than the instructions seemed to say. Turns out, that was a good thing though when we checked the mold assuming it would be almost ready to unmold and discovered that the tire was floating at the top of the silicone. We weighted it back down and kept our fingers crossed overnight while plotting backup plans in case of an epic fail. I’m certain it was a pretty amusing sight watching us unmold the tire the next morning at work, all while trying to be quiet so our manager wouldn't realize that anything was up.

Oh! the other important lesson... Make sure that the object you're using to make the mold is actually solid and doesn't have tiny holes the liquid silicone can go in ...the unmolding process gets trickier when the silicone is inside the object you're trying to remove. A few bits of mold repair later and chocolate tires could be made. Not sure if either of us will ever use a tire mold again, but you just never know.

We had recruited Stacy’s fiancé to make us a wooden cake board and a four legged structure for the base of the transport truck. When we had the cake stacked and the trailer portion covered with fondant my brother helpfully pointed out that it more like an AT-AT from Star Wars and I can't sat I disagree with him.

Stay tuned for part two with the final results after a long evening of decorating.