here are photos from the labor-intensive, crazy CRAZY time-consuming wedding-type birthday cake i made for randy.

first, i made the four layers, filled and frosted them.  i bought a new 16″ pan because for my wedding cake i had a 6, 9, 12, 14 inch pan, and the bottom layer was too small and the proportions didn’t seem right.  so i agonized a while about buying a 15 vs a 16″ pan and finally settled on the larger one.  it worked well except that huge pan was difficult to maneuver around.  flipping one layer onto the top of the other layer was quite a trick.  i spent an entire day doing the baking/frosting, then i wrapped and wrapped and wrapped them in tons of plastic wrap and foil.

i then started on the gum paste decorations.  i’d picked an art deco-kind of design that looked “easy.”  WRONG.  it involved gum paste and run-in sugar and HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF GOLD DRAGEES.  well, silver ones, but i decided to use gold instead.  it was hard just finding the dragees because it called for about four or five different sizes of them, and i’ve only seen one size at mae’s cake topper here in town.  i went online and spent lots of time researching them.  at many places there were ridiculously expensive, but i finally found a place with more reasonable prices.  it’s called SUGARCRAFT, and i got dragees plus other things there, like gold powder color.

the thing is that gold dragees aren’t classified as “edible” here in the US, so they sold different sized dragees that were gold-like but not shiny and really gold.  but they said you could mix the dragees with the gold powder.

here is a SMALL SAMPLING of the many dragees i bought and colored.  i actually ran out of them and had to buy a bottle from mae’s at the last minute, and then i mixed them with size that i bought for the edge of the cake.

gum paste is like modeling clay, but it’s pure white.  i had to roll it out and cut it, then use a little ridged roller to make a pattern in it.  it worked pretty well except i didn’t have the huge, huge amount of different cutters that you were supposed to get.  i just bought a bag of gum paste cutters and improvised.  the cutters are pretty much like cookie cutters, except there are about a million different shapes.  here are the leaves i did for the top cake ornament.  i had to drape them over cardboard so they’d dry with a bend in them.

after they hardened, i mixed the gold powder with lemon extract to make a thin paint, and painted them.  i was very happy with how they turned out.

here are these other ornaments i made for the sides of the cake.  i made the individual pieces, and after they dried and i’d painted them, i stuck them together with frosting.  in the book it said to sprinkle little dragees along the middle of each decoration but i decided that i might run out, plus i just didn’t need or want to use that many of the damn things.

here’s the topper – it’s a half styrofoam ball covered with a couple different sizes of dragees, and then i stuck the gum paste leaves in the top.

this is a shot of the many things i made.  the triangles on the bottom right are the paterns for the run-in sugar decorations.  these were going to be places all around the top of each layer, and there was a pattern in the book for the triangles.  but the layer sizes of the cake in the book were different from all my layers, so i had to create my own patterns.  this was a horrible pain in the ass, and i worried about making the right sizes because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t go all around the layers.  i had to do lots of measuring, calculating and cutting, and it was a nightmare.  i finally did it, though, and then pasted the little patterns to the back of a piece of waxed paper.  i then outlined each piece with purple frosting, and then squeezed thinned icing into each shape.  they then had to harden a while.

it all took a long, long, long time.  i will never, ever do anything with run-in sugar again.  for the top layer i made just one big circle with points, but when i went to peel it off the paper, it broke up into a million pieces.  i made another one and kevin meticulously cut the wax paper, leaving the frosting attached.

down there on the very lower right are the purple bars i cut out of gum paste.  also another nightmare that took a ridiculous amount of time.  they were to be pressed into the side of each layer, so they had to be the right height for each one.  i measured each cake layer before putting them in the freezer.  the layers were supposed to be perfectly flat; i was supposed to shave off the top of each one so they were perfect, but they weren’t.  so i painstakingly measured 16 places on each layer.

i then cut the strips to the exact measurement.  the problem is, the sizes didn’t match up a lot of the time because of all the frosting or whatever.  so then i had to very delicately saw the hardened strips with a knife before i placed them on the sides of the cake.

this is after i’d placed all the stripes and most of the triangles.  you see that there are some dragees – each stripe was supposed to have a line of them, but i knew i needed way way more dragees than i had, so instead i put tsome on the top and bottom layers.  i shouldn’t have used any, because even though i put them on with clear piping gel and they seemed to harden, the minute i picked them up the damn things kept falling off.

and here it is after i put the top ornament on.  mom helped me put the dragees all around the triangles.  this took a whole lot of time.  EVERYTHING took a whole lot of time.  literally hours and hours and hours for each and every step.  just making and coloring the gum paste took an entire weekend.

and…TA DA!  here it is.  i added some piped frosting to the bottom of the top ornament because there was a gap.  i realized that this wedding cake book almost exclusively used gum paste, and hardly any frosting decor.  decorating with frosting is ONE MILLION TIMES EASIER.

it does look great, but thank god for that – what if it had turned out really badly?  one side of one layer was sagging down a little, but i put that side facing the back.

i love my friend randy, but i had NO IDEA that this was going to be such a huge, huge ordeal that took so much time and money.  like i said, i will never undertake anything like this.,

something different maybe, something not as mathematically challenging that doesn’t involve so many damn decorations.

lori ann, a friend of randy’s and mine, said it would be funny to make a video about the cake-making – i could act like i was doing all the work, and she’d be off drinking.  i thought this was a hilarious idea, so we spent an afternoon pretending to construct the cake.  i then shot lots of shots of her alone, and then, when i was putting it all together on the thursday before the party, we filmed shots of me putting it all together.

i had to edit the whole thing on friday, but it was too long, and then i did a final edit saturday morning of the party.  the video turned out pretty well, and hopefully i’m going to put it up here soon.  i had to divide it into two parts to put it up on you tube so i can post it here.

whew, that’s a lot of writing this morning when i just got out of bed.

i have to tell the tale of THE BOAT, a comedy of errors yesterday afternoon.

later…

ok then,

wednesday grace.