Sometimes desperation leads to inspiration

Sometimes inspiration comes from funny places and in little bits at a time. That was the lesson I learned on my most recent cake adventure.

In the middle of post-truck cake exhaustion, it's my mom's birthday. For just about anyone else, I'd have found some way to have someone else make or buy a cake, but it's my mom. What else could I do but make her the chocolate cake that she requested? And really, we're not talking just make a cake and slap some icing on it either. It's my mom and it needs to be special just like she is. But my brain feels like all creativity and potential inspiration have been, well, shall we say run over by a large truck ... that seems about right.

You need to know that my mom collects miniature watering cans. A few weeks before i had picked up a cute little bird holdings blue watering can that I'd planned to wrap up since she already knew about the Riverdance tickets that I'd bought. When still desperately seeking inspiration on the morning of my mom's birthday, I decided that the bird could go on top of the cake in a little nest. It seemed like a good idea that couldn't be too hard to execute.

Time and energy were running short so I quickly ditched the idea of baking my own perfectly shaped macaroon nest and went for picking up some store bought chocolate drizzled macaroons that I knew were soft enough to be shaped a bit and formed into a nest on top of the cake I'd already iced with white buttercream. If you're thinking I may have made a critical error in icing color, you'd be totally correct.

They say necessity is the mother of invention, well apparently it's also the mother of inspiration. The bird's nest looked, well, silly on the white icing. I didn't have enough icing made to re-ice the cake brown to make it look like a tree trunk which would have been the best "thinking ahead" original choice. But I did have enough that I could make some brown and green to make a tree branch across the top of the cake.

I piped the branch and some bonus twigs, started to add some green leaves but it still wasn't looking right. Now the it wasn't just the nest floating on a sea of white, the branch was just laying around with no context. Oh did I mention that my mom was sitting watching TV in the family room attached to the kitchen and she picked that moment to turn around and ask how things were going. Talk about needing to have my brief moments of panic be very quiet along the way.

Next solution, add a tree trunk down one side of the cake and finish adding the leaves, all while keeping my fingers crossed that this was going to be enough. I wrapped the bird's little feet and bottom with plastic wrap since I couldn't guarantee food safety and placed him on the cake thinking that I had no more ideas left and still wasn't convinced it was going to look right.

Much to my surprise, lo and behold, while I wasn't paying attention a rather cute cake emerged that seemed just right. I wish I'd taken pictures along the way when I was panicking because looking at the finished cake makes my stress seem silly. You'd almost think I knew what I was doing when I started... Nope! But thankfully, sometimes it all works out the way it should even when you've totally failed in the planning part.

Sometimes you’ve just got to go big…Part 2

There was still a long night of decorating ahead before the cake was finished, but before we were ready for that, we’d had a couple of other challenges to figure out.

Given where we work, it had seemed right that we should have an official out of service notice for the truck. I had access to create a personalized form in our test environment, but then we needed to get it printed on something edible. Several emails with another cake decorating friend, followed by a couple of phone calls to local grocery stores … oh, plus one false start because I didn't think to ask about what file formats their software would accept … and we discovered the joy of printing with edible ink on rice paper to make the logos for the truck and our Out of Service CVSA Inspection for the truck's driver. It definitely paid to ask around since one store was almost half the cost of the other.

When we started planning we had two toy trucks to use. One that had great tires and one that had a cab shape we liked so that I could use it as a mold around which the gum paste could dry to get a smooth finish for the cab. Tightly wrapping the truck in plastic wrap solved the food safe problem. Spray on food colouring avoided the potential issue of gum paste fading as it dries. Even with a few issues of the spray nozzle getting clogged (pulling the nozzle off and soaking it in hot water solved that issue), it looked like it should be a smooth road ahead when we were ready to assemble the truck. But sometimes, there are still unexpected bumps.

When we were stacking the truck portion of the cake, we discovered it needed to stick out over the edge of the wooden structure so that the tires could be positioned correctly. The other choice would have been to mount the legs in an inch or so from the edge, but we were a little late realizing that. Expanding the truck width wouldn’t have been an issue, except for that previously mentioned gum paste. Problem was that meant the final size of the truck was larger than the hardened and painted gum paste and there was no time to make new ones. A little creative use of black fondant added some black stripes to the cab that ended up working to make it a better look for to go with our trucking company name of Queen Bee Trucking.

A late night of decorating had us almost complete with a few last details to add the next morning once the cake was safely transported.

While we may have had a few snags a long they way, there were also some unexpected bonuses. I found some leftover yellow fondant roses from the scrabble cake tucked safely away when I was pulling out some piping gel to use to add lighting detail. Since yellow roses are our manager's favourite flower, I tucked them in the bag with all the last minute bits in cases they were useful for repairing any damage during transport. They turned out to be exactly the right thing to tie in the out of service notice so that it didn't look like it had just been stuck on as an afterthought.

The other bonus... Our manager happened to wear an outfit in one of her favourite colours that was a perfect match to the color of the clothing of the fondant figure I'd made of her to drive the truck, complete with the ever-present hair bun.  It just wouldn’t be her without it!

 

We did some creative cake cutting to keep everything looking pretty during the open house and to prove it really was all cake.

It was crazy amount of work and it definitely stretched my decorating skills pretty close to their current limit, but I learned so much, had a great time creating a cake with a friend, and the look on our manager's face when she saw what we'd created, made all the work and sleep deprivation worthwhile. On the day we presented the cake I wasn't sure I'd be able to say this, but I'd do it again ... Or better yet something just as big but different, because who wants to repeat the same creation!

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.