Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Twinkle, Twinkle and Massive Cake Farts

My neighbor asked me to make a cake for her son Erich who just turned 2. I learned that I'm apparently not very knowledgeable about what two-year-olds like to watch. :) But he is a big fan of this video:


Pretty trippy, right? But I loved the colors,stars, oh the clouds! and the little blue and purple elephant.

Everything started out nice. Cake baked up sweet and dense, buttercream went on fairly smooth and easy, and fondant rolled right on and smoothed right out the very first time! That's a big deal, particularly since it's been 115° around here. I made some cool decorations, worked with wires, stuck on some stars and clouds and was feeling pretty confident. Bad sign at that point.

You see, cakes are moody creatures. I'd chilled the buttercream covered cakes to get it nice and hard so that the fondant didn't slide all over the place when I stuck it on. Common practice, I promise. But as the cake warmed with the fondant over it, it got the farts. The gas release causes GINORMOUS bubbles under the fondant. No matter how many times I popped them and tried to smooth the fondant down, they'd grow right back. To the point where the left side of the cake ended up a saggy, bubbly, ripply mess. :( It didn't help that the clouds were heavy, or that the decorations got squished down into the fondant as I tried to smooth it.

Hopefully all that has been hid or artfully turned away from the camera in the pictures. :)

 Isn't the little elephant precious?! And those little curls on top! Makes me swoon.
 And oh those little purple toenails!

I also made a little cake for just the birthday boy. I'll admit, not my best work. But I underestimated the difficulty in decorating a 3" block. 

The little guy and his cake, isn't he adorable?

And since this has become a favorite part for me, the aftermath:
See how the fondant sagged over the clouds in the border? Shameful. The cake is my favorite Magnolia Bakery Vanilla cake with chopped up strawberries added. The strawberries released some of their juices and made it nice and dense and moist. The frosting is standard American buttercream, which is so amazingly, teeth-numbingly sweet.

And here is Erich's little cake. A bit of eating out of the top and a lot of poking the sides with his fingers.

Happy 2nd Birthday Erich!

2 comments:

  1. Very cute! I'd never heard of cakes getting the farts before...:)

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  2. my cakes started "farting" last year. it is the most frustrating thing i've ever experienced. i am almost at the point where i don't want to use fondant anymore. i have 3 cakes to cover in the morning and i am searching ways to avoid "the farts".

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