Holy moly but this project was a doozy. A 10' inch refrigerated cheescake with 24 mini cheescakes. Sounds easy enough, ha! It wasn't, ok the making of the cheescakes was easy but the decorating was a complete pain, I had to do several tests to see what would and what wouldn't work and after numerous swear words and lots of stamping of feet I came up with the following. The birthday girl wanted butterflies in pinks, mauves, lilac's and aqua and the cake had to be cheescake, the rest was up to me. The problem with cheescake is it doesn't like any type of decorations (other than fresh cream and fruit) any type of fondant or pastillage tends to sweat and then go mushy so that leaves you with chocolate. I love to eat chocolate but am not overly confident in using it in decoration, its an unpredictable cranky medium and one I'd like to stay away from. In the end I used white chocolate modelling paste to make the butterflies and coated the underside of each butterfly with white chocolate to stop it absorbing moisture while resting on the cake. I tried to think how to cover the cake to make it look pretty and thought a chocolate collar might work really well, the 1st chocolate collar I made turned out quite well (that was my back up collar) but my 2nd collar (using edible pattern sheets) was a shamozzle. I managed to get half the collar on but the 2nd half had a serious kink in it and I wasn't quick enough to smooth it out, then it broke when I tried to remove the acetate arghhhhh. Back to the drawingboard so I tried making the collar in 4 pannels and with a half circle pattern on the rim so it didn't look unproffesional and shoddy. It worked and the impromptu lattice swirl effect I popped on afterwards made it look even better. It was quite fragile and I had kittens trying to keep it safe for the past three days, esp when I was "gluing" on the butterflies with chocolate.
The number 13 is also made from choc fondant and resting on a choc plaque. I used some Christina Re butterfly paper to cover the cupcake supports (seen in the top pic) and made matching cupcake wrappers to go around my mini cheescakes (encased in foil wrappers to stop the moisture and fat "bleeding" through) The most stressful part for me was keeping it all refrigerated till the last minute, then quickly popping on the butterflies and then dropping it off intact. Don't think I'll be doing anymore of these in a hurry!
Holy moly but this project was a doozy. A 10' inch refrigerated cheescake with 24 mini cheescakes. Sounds easy enough, ha! It wasn't, ok the making of the cheescakes was easy but the decorating was a complete pain, I had to do several tests to see what would and what wouldn't work and after numerous swear words and lots of stamping of feet I came up with the following. The birthday girl wanted butterflies in pinks, mauves, lilac's and aqua and the cake had to be cheescake, the rest was up to me. The problem with cheescake is it doesn't like any type of decorations (other than fresh cream and fruit) any type of fondant or pastillage tends to sweat and then go mushy so that leaves you with chocolate. I love to eat chocolate but am not overly confident in using it in decoration, its an unpredictable cranky medium and one I'd like to stay away from. In the end I used white chocolate modelling paste to make the butterflies and coated the underside of each butterfly with white chocolate to stop it absorbing moisture while resting on the cake. I tried to think how to cover the cake to make it look pretty and thought a chocolate collar might work really well, the 1st chocolate collar I made turned out quite well (that was my back up collar) but my 2nd collar (using edible pattern sheets) was a shamozzle. I managed to get half the collar on but the 2nd half had a serious kink in it and I wasn't quick enough to smooth it out, then it broke when I tried to remove the acetate arghhhhh. Back to the drawingboard so I tried making the collar in 4 pannels and with a half circle pattern on the rim so it didn't look unproffesional and shoddy. It worked and the impromptu lattice swirl effect I popped on afterwards made it look even better. It was quite fragile and I had kittens trying to keep it safe for the past three days, esp when I was "gluing" on the butterflies with chocolate.
The number 13 is also made from choc fondant and resting on a choc plaque. I used some Christina Re butterfly paper to cover the cupcake supports (seen in the top pic) and made matching cupcake wrappers to go around my mini cheescakes (encased in foil wrappers to stop the moisture and fat "bleeding" through) The most stressful part for me was keeping it all refrigerated till the last minute, then quickly popping on the butterflies and then dropping it off intact. Don't think I'll be doing anymore of these in a hurry!