Ship shape and ready to go!

Yo Ho! Lets Go! At this time of year we have the most special birthday cake to make, this year hes moved on from Power Rangers to Jake and the Neverland Pirates, the perfect character for a cake. As always Rob made a brilliant job carving the cake:

It needed a bit of propping up to begin with until the buttercream hardened in the fridge and could be 'dirty iced' (someones been watching too much Cake Boss....). This provided the perfect base for the sugarpaste covering and I must say Sattina Sugarpaste is by far the best sugarpaste we've used so far. It was soft and pliable straight from the tub but didn't stick to the worksurface. It also smelt absolutely fantastic!

Anyway onto the cake, instead of using a single piece of sugarpaste we made each wooden plank of the ship individually included hand indenting the wood grain effect. It took hours but this is one cake where no effort is too much.

To bring out the woodgrain effect we used the airbrush sprayed at an angle. Once suuficently covered and dried we added the finer details and displayed it ready for the Birthday Boy.

Another cake done and more orders in the pipeline :)

Testing the new toy :)

It was a cold morning on 25th December when I opened quite possibly the best Christmas present ever. After attaching the gun to the hose and air compressor my new airbrush was ready to go! This post will be all about my first attempt at using the airbrush.

To start with I watched this brilliant video tutorial by Krazy Kool Cakes. The next step was to protect the table! 

A couple of drops of Teal food colouring (which apparently has 'adverse effects on children....') and the airbrush was ready to go. To spray the food colouring you simply have to pull back on the trigger. Covering a cake in a solid colour was a lot easier than anticipated. As long as the board was continuously moving on the turntable the colour applied fairly evenly.

 

Next up was attempting to create a wood effect. I started with some small white 'planks' of sugarpaste and indented a wood effect onto them. The colour was sprayed on at an angle to ensure the grain stood out. After colouring I attempted to transfer the 'planks' to the cake... bad idea. The food colouring makes the sugarpaste a lot softer and its really hard to handle.

My final test was to colour some small sugarpaste butterflies and apply them to the cake. However I had the same issue with the sugarpaste going soggy after applying the colour.

Overall the cake went well but next time I try a wood effect I'm going to stick the planks onto the cake first and then spray them!