My Busy Weekend, Part 1

I'm still recovering from this weekend.  I had three cakes due, one on Friday, one on Saturday, and one due today (Sunday).  I'm not sure even how to start describing it all, so I guess I'll just dig in!

  I had a Striped Kitty Cat Cake due on Friday.  It's yellow cake with chocolate filling and crumbcoat, covered with vanilla buttercream applied with the grass tip to look like fur.  The inspiration photo was pretty boring and the Client pretty much gave me free reign with design, which was nice.  Two of the cakes this weekend were for her.  She has twins that are turning 8, and she was inspired by the figure 8 shape in the two cakes she picked out.  I decided to do a tye-dyed fondant cake board to add flair.  Baking and layering was very simple, and this was a pretty straightforward cake.  It did take me a while to stick the "hair" on (not to mention my carpal tunnel was going nuts on me by the end!) but it was a very relaxing activity.  I did end up putting green cat eyes on it after I took the picture, but forgot to take another afterward, so this is what I have!  As I was looking at the inspiration picture vs. the picture of my cake after she left, I realized I didn't add whiskers!  I hope nobody really noticed...well I guess I just called myself out on it anyway!
The next cake was due on Saturday.  There is such a long and drawn out story to this cake, so I'll condense it as much as possible.  The Clients were a very sweet couple and they wanted the Bucket of Bud Light cake.  It looked pretty straightforward so I went to work.  Everything went wrong that could!

During our consultation, I told them I'd use rice krispie treats covered in chocolate for the bottles...then I saw something online that I really wanted to try and I went out and bought this paintable latex molding compound and spent two days making a mold out of a beer bottle and letting it dry.

Then I poured super hot sugar into the mold and these wonderful bottles came out!  I was so excited, so I wrote the client and asked if she wanted the sugar bottles...good thing I did, because she was pretty excited about the rice krispie treat/chocolate combo!  I do have to admit, the RKT bottles were much more tasty!  So I set about making the bottles by making a 1/3 recipe of regular RKT and molding it to look like a very skinny bottle (to allow for the extra layers of chocolate to be painted on top).  Each bottle took 1/3 recipe of RKT.  The secret to making them hold their form is to pack them very tightly!

Then I coated each one with milk chocolate, two layers, by brushing it on.  Mmmmmmm.  The labels on the bottles are painted rolled buttercream.  The labels on the top were SO tiny, even my super small brush was too big to use very easily!  I did multiple labels trying to get them better...with no avail.  Instead of freaking out, I just went with the best I could do.  I overshot my abilities on this one, I think!

When the time came to stack the tiers (3 tiers of 2-layer chocolate cake with strawberry filling and vanilla buttercream frosting) I realized I had drastically underestimated the sheer weight and top-heaviness of the cake.  I tried setting the bottles in the top and the whole top tier broke into little pieces.  And I realized that the party was in Petersburg and there would be a stop in-between...the cake needed strength!  So that night I stayed up until 2am (usual bedtime on the weekends?  10 LOL) baking more cakes and re-stacking using 1/4" dowels hammered through the reinforced 2-layer foam boards (replaced the cardboard I had used before) and into the new 4-layer (up from 2) foam cake board at the bottom.  I measured, cut, and sharpened the dowels and actually used a HAMMER to push them through all the layers.  Then I made a pilot hole in the the bottles by pushing a dowel through the bottom center of all the bottles and placed those on four of the five 1/4" dowels.  The top tier broke into pieces AGAIN.  The picture is right before things got really ugly.  I realized the bottles had to set very lightly into the cake, not set in as was described in the tutorials I'd seen.  At this point I was going nuts, so I boiled some sugar and corn syrup to the hard crack stage and poured it into the cracks.  MISTAKE!  lol I am so lucky I didn't ruin the bottom two tiers.  I was so tired at this point that I put it in the fridge and went to bed.  The next morning I woke up at 7am and started baking again.  I made the label for the bucket out of regular fondant and coloring gel and placed it.
The ice is 1/2c sugar and 1/2c corn syrup melted down and boiled until just before it turns yellow.  I crinkled up a piece of nonstick tin foil (nonstick part is CRUCIAL) and made little ice cube trays of sorts out of it. Then I poured the hot hot sugar into the "mold" I had made and let them cool, then popped them out and set them on the cake.  Voila, ice in the bucket.  And you know what?  They tasted like cotton candy to me! 

The cake was done.  Gosh, that was the condensed version, and I'm pooped out!  I wish I was more proud of it than I am, you know?  I spent SO much time and energy on it.  At least it tasted good!  I did get an email from the Clients today that told me that everyone LOVED the cake and it was SOOOO good, so that makes me feel really great...but I really wish I could have knocked this one out of the park for these people.  But, as a good friend of mine told me about this situation, we have to have bad experiences in order to appreciate the good ones.  She is so smart! :)
I will post later today or tomorrow about the Race Track Cake.  The Client is bringing little matchbox cars for the top, and I want a picture of it all finished!