The Engagement Cake
Today I am making the cake for the engagement party. Why so early you ask? Well I’m using a fantastic recipe from the KiwiCake‘s forum which tastes better if you bake it in advance and then freeze it for about a week. I used this recipe to make this cake
My son's first birthday cake
Well, the ball is the chocolate mud cake I’m baking today and the “field” was banana cake iced with lemon buttercream tinted green 
So the plan for the cake is to bake it today, obviously, then I’m going to wrap it and freeze it until next Friday. Next Friday I will crumb coat/dirty ice it with some Swiss Meringue Buttercream that I made last week for icing some cupcakes I took to a baby shower. It’s flavoured with vanilla bean so should go nicely with the cake. Then comes the tricky part – covering the cake with fondant. I used fondant with the soccer ball cake but I cut pieces out and stuck them on to get the panelled effect, covering an entire cake with one piece of fondant is an art apparently and I have been watching lots of video tutorials to pick up all the tricks of the trade.
Once its covered with the white fondant hopefully I will have a nice smooth surface and then I am going to paint one of these babies on it;
Pretty cool huh? I have this image in my head and I really want it to work out, fingers crossed! I think I might end up being up till midnight again with this cake. That’s about what it took with the soccer ball one. I was going to make cupcakes as well but that ended up being delegated to one of the other bridesmaids, I was going to attempt to make them look like this;
Isn’t it gorgeous! Anyway I have to let somethings go don’t I? This way I can focus on getting the cake perfect.
I’ve ordered my supplies from Kiwi Cakes and they should arrive early next week. I’ve ordered gel food colouring in Teal, Navy Blue, Black and Regal Purple, Metallic food paint in dark gold and an edible marker pen in silver grey.
My plan:
- Trace the image of the peacock onto the cake using the edible marker pen, I got the silver so that it’s light enough to be covered up with the “paint” but still easy to see.
- Paint the areas gradually mixing the colours together to create the right look
- Outline the image in black and then do all the details in black to
- Add the gold highlights
Depending on how it looks and whether I’ve got enough fondant left over I’m going to attempt to make some flowers out of fondant that look like the flowers on the paper
I may be being overly ambitious but this is what I really want to do for them so I’m going to work my hardest at it.
I’ll post a photo of the final product, maybe even some of the process depending on how it goes of course