70th Birthday Cake Days 4-5 & Elise's Birthday

So here is the last two days of the cake, a little late, but nonetheless, here it is...  :)

Day 4 - Covering and Spraying

Part-way through putting cocoa through the fondant - it took a long
time and boy did my wrists know it by the end!  :P

I had thought long and hard about how to make black icing.  You can buy pre-c
oloured fondant, but it is so much more expensive, and also it is a different brand, which can make a lot of difference if you are not used to working with it.  So, I was looking for some different options.   Although you can buy black food dye, it doesn't work because the icing is pure white, and so  you can only get a grey.  (The same happens with red, by the way.)  After doing lots of research, I finally came up with the following method, and hoped it would work...  When kneading the icing to make it pliable, I mixed in a lot of cocoa powder as well.  This gave the fondant a chocolate colour as well as flavour, which I thought was really nice.  To cover the cake, I used 1.5 kg of fondant.  I could have really used some more, as I found out later, but you can never truly tell until it is too late with these things!

After the Fondant is on.  If you look in the top of the left sleeve,
you can see the patchy icing job.  

Then I rolled out the fondant big enough to cover the cake.  I didn't take many photos of this phase, because I get in the zone of cake decorating, and don't think about much else while I am concentrating.  :)  To work out how big you need to roll the fondant, measure the widest part of your cake, plus the sides, and add a couple more centimeters all together and then roll out the fondant that large.  I  have a PVC pipe which I use to help roll out large pieces of icing.  When it is big enough, I rolled up the icing around the pipe, and then unrolled it over the cake.  Fondant is quite heavy and so you need to cut off the excess quite quickly otherwise it will tear over the corners.  Smoothing down the edges and pressing into the corners, I cut of the excess and used my fondant smoother to make sure it was lying as flat as possible.  Unfortunately. because of the extra cocoa powder, the fondant dried out a lot quicker than usual, and I had trouble getting it off the table and onto the cake.  This led to a rather dodgy icing corner on the cake, which we smoothed over as best as we could, but it still wasn't perfect.  The rest of the icing went on quite well.

Spray painting!!  :D

Then for the black!  I bought some Wilton Black colour mist, and literally spray painted my entire cake.  I used the whole can, and had to go back to the shops to get another one to cover some patchy areas.  But it worked quite well.  The spray takes a long time to dry, so I left it overnight.  The colour seemed to be a bit too brown at one stage in the drying process which had me quite concerned, but it darkened as it dried, to a nice black, which I was happy with.

This is just after I sprayed the cake.  It is a little patchy, which
I did fix up later, and you can see how the colour darkens later
on.

Day 5 - Decorating

The finished product!

The next day, I used both the paper map of the cake and the original picture to help me get the decorating right.  I coloured some fondant orange (using a mixture of red, black and yellow food dye) and let it to rest about half an hour.  Normally I colour the icing the day before, because it gives the fondant time to set again with the extra liquid in it, and also the colour can deepen with time.  But we had been too busy the day before, and I hadn't had time.

I cut out the white and orange pieces, and layed them onto the cake, arranging them until I was happy with the look.  Then I flipped the pieces of fondant over, and rubbed a little water on the back to make it stick, and then I was done!  (there are no photos of this process, because, once again, I was in the zone, and it is too hard to take photos while decorating.  :P)

 ~

The cake - it is not a particularly good photo,
because of the sun, but you get the idea.  

Saturday was also Elise's 13th Birthday.  She had a lovely day.  We opened presents in the morning, and she was most delighted with her Kindle Reader from Mum and Dad, and an assortment of other things from us kids.

Grace and I made her birthday cake.  It is Cinderella from the new movie which was only released a few days before her birthday, and consequently was also one of her birthday presents....

(A side funny story  :D...... When Grace and I were making the cake, we were having trouble getting the shape of the cake right (aka the skirt).  The doll we had bought was quite tall, and we had to build the cake up to make it proportionally accurate.  Then, after we had shaped it up, we had to cut a hole down the middle for the doll to sit.  However, that too proved to be difficult.  I cut down about half way, and then we had the bright idea of chopping the doll at the knees.  So, with no anesthetic, and a bread knife, our poor Cinderella became an amputee! :P)

Rosie waiting for the show to start, all dressed
up like a pirate.  :)

In the afternoon, we all went to see the stage show of Pirates of Penzance that Mum and Dad were playing in.  We had all been to see it at least twice before, but this time we had front row seats, and it never gets old.  I did take some photos, but was later told that photos weren't allowed, so unfortunately I won't post them....

That evening, Mum and Dad had another show, so we rushed home, had dinner, and then they left again.  Elise got to rediscover all her presents and answer the numerous phone calls!

Being the last show, Mum and Dad had to pack up the instruments and everything and then attend the presentations afterwards, which meant they didn't get home until about 1 am.  Dad and I had an early start at Church the next morning (we had to be there by 8:00 am) so we were all exhausted by the days end, but it was good.