No Tears in Cake!

This weekend I got to go to my first 'real' cake workshop....2 days, 24 hours of cake work, and so much information I'm about to bust! I learned so much and had the best time meeting other cake artists. Our theme was no cake fear...because there are no tears in cake! Over the course of the weekend, we made cakes that looked like designer purses. Such fun!

I tried to photo document the whole thing, not only so I can remember what I learned, but also so I could watch the transformation all over again. Many times when I reached for the camera I was too covered in modeling chocolate, luster dust, or cornstarch for pictures...but here are some of the ones I took!

We started out leveling and stacking our cakes, using dowel rods, foam core, butter cream, and bubble tea straws (one of my new favorite things!). This picture shows a semi-stable cake, ready for ganache (my next new favorite thing!)....but it doesn't show that I barely had enough cake, that my buttercream was too stiff, and that my cake was too soft and crummy. Needless to say, at this point I was a little concerned!

We next covered our cakes with a layer of chocolate ganache. Now, my ganache was not the best. And my cake had to be placed in the 'rehab freezer' for 'damage control' because it was so soft and runny. It got a little dicey at this point. So when I came in this morning and saw that the ganache had set up, I was SUPER happy! So happy that we snapped this spontaneous picture....

While our cakes were setting up, we went ahead and made chocolate champagne bottles for our purses to carry. We poured colored and melted chocolate, and then poured them into bottle molds. An hour later and a little carving later, poof! A chocolate champagne bottle!

Add a few sugar labels, and its pretty impressive. It looked so real, I absolutely love this bottle...can someone please ask for a bottle in their cake so I can do this again??

Once the ganache had set up, we covered it with fondant. Ganache makes fondanting SO easy...it looked great! Flawless (haha well, almost, and thats way better than nothing!) Chocolate fondant, I found, tastes SO much better than regular fondant. Even though fondant is not my preference, I learned this weekend that there ARE some delicious ways that it can be done. Chocolate is yummy, but there are other good vanilla options too! And now that I know more about this, maybe I can use it more!

Then I stitched the borders.....

And added thousands of hand cut, individually assembled and luster dusted logos...

A couple of handles, a champagne bottle, a blanket, and gum paste flowers...and I had a pretty darn cute bag! I am SO proud of this cake...obviously, as I took loads of pictures of it, but it was such hard work that really paid off. It was nice to remember why I love doing these.... and I can't wait to give this one another try sometime!

Me, super happy it turned out so well. I had the best time at this workshop, and learned so much!

Oh and did I mention....it was kind of delicious? :)

~Beth