Saturday, July 25, 2009

Rugby cake

I did this cake topper for Kimball, who is in town for a weekend with friends to celebrate an upcoming wedding. The bride played rugby with some (all?) of them, which provided inspiration for the scene.

There were a few things I did for this cake that I hadn't tried before: curly hair, positioning a figure lying down, and dirt. Ohhhh, the dirt. The hair was not as difficult as I thought it would be--I just wrapped the strands around a dowel rod and let them set up for a while before I attached them. I was sure that making a person lying on the ground would be no big deal, but I was wrong about that. Apparently the pressure brought to the individual pieces of the figures done in a sitting or standing position is more important to cementing the person as a whole than I had realized. It was fine, but I had to be very careful to provide support to the limbs when I moved the poor tackled body. Applying the dirt to the people was hard...call it vanity, but I really didn't want to mess up their clothes or faces that I had spent time crafting.

After watching people pull their fondant figures off of the cakes I made and set them aside (don't ask me what you do with these once the cake is cut and everything is over), I thought I would try to preserve the scene by putting it all on a masonite board covered in fondant. That way, the whole scene can be lifted off the cake on the board with less mess.

So here it is: The figures are fondant, the grass is buttercream, the dirt is royal icing, and there are a few chocolate rocks thrown in for good measure. Good thing I got to use that grass tip again. The cake was white with vanilla buttercream frosting.



...from the back--the ponytail:


...and the one who didn't make it. I made this figure to go on the topper, but she was just too tall and I had to leave her out:

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