Keep Calm and Carry Cake

I make baked goods as a form of stress-relief, and as this week was particularly rough for me, I decided I needed a REAL project. Something I hadn’t ever done before that would take up a lot of time (which would mean I would be thinking of frosting instead of real life for hours on end). So I decided to teach myself how to make royal icing, a form of icing that gets really stiff, and give stenciling a go.

A few weeks before I was walking down the street this book caught my eye. It is amazing and super easy. The first cake I made waswith the bird stencil provided, and I just sprinkled cocoa powder over the top. I got too excited and missed some of the directions (when using powder you should cover the stencil in Pam or Crisco and it will catch the extra), but it turned out very nicely despite my inability to follow directions, as you can see.

But for this stress I needed a bigger challenge. A lot of fancy cakes use stencils for their designs. You’ll often see this on white cakes with fancy black detail, but I wanted to use some colored fondant I had left over, so I kept the royal icing white (although in retrospect, dyeing it would have taken even MORE time, so in the future I may need to do this).

I tore the crap out of the blue fondant I began with, and then needed to recover the sides, so I went with some purple. No one is kidding when they say you have to be ready to cover you cake as soon as you roll out your fondant. I wasted time, and it got too dry. Don’t be like me folks!

Anyway, I rolled out more, and did my best to cover all of my mistakes in purple. Then I got to work. I stenciled the top, which only took about a minute. But I was prepared for this. I’d heard that stenciling the sides was the tough part. This isn’t a joke. Side stenciling IS harsh. The stencil moves around, and your fingers are always in the way. I’ll need to figure out a way to get it to stay in place. Plus I decided to use only part of the stencil, so making sure you don’t accidentally do more of the picture is tricky. But, all said and done, I thought it looked pretty cool. Next time I can probably get the lines a little cleaner. What do you think?