My first fondant cake for a very special friend

One of the objectives I set for myself during this period of unemployment is to practice my cake decorating skills. For people who know me, they know how much I hate and suck at doing that. All the pipings, sugar flowers making and fondant work is my achilles' heel.I absolutely couldn't sit down to decorate cakes with buttercream and fondant.If given a choice,I would rather make cakes with multiple components anytime.

But cake decorating is such an important part of being a pastry chef, so I am determine to better my skills in this aspect.

So when my friends Cindy and Rika asked if I could make a safari theme baby shower cake for our dear friend Grace, I said yes.

The first thing I did upon accepting the assignment was to look up the safari related pictures on the internet. The cakes that other talented cake decorators made, the shower invitation cards, party decoration materials and everything else. I decided to make something simple since I have zero experience in making a real fondant cake.

Since Grace is going to have a baby boy born in the chinese zodiac year of tiger, I decided to make a tiger gumpaste figurine, among other animals. Then I wanted to cut out some rolled fondant animals to put on the sides of the cake. They were monkeys, giraffes,hippo and elephants. Fairly simple animals to make.

A simple sketch was drawn as a guide.

Although the fondant animals I chosed were just some simple designs, it still took me a whole afternoon to make them. Then I went on to make leaves of different sizes.

I was certain that I would have enough time to put everything together on Saturday night after I made the cake and filling. After applying a thin layer of buttercream coating I let the cake rest in the cooler. An hour later, I rolled out the fondant to cover the cake. I decided to leave the base white, which I regretted later. It looked like an empty canvas! OCT commented that the cake looked like an incomplete piece of work with the white base.

But it's starting to get late and I was having difficulty smoothening the sides of the cake, so changing the base color was not an option. Up till this point, I have only covered fondant over cake dummies in school which were hard, solid and fairly tolerable to vigorous pressing and smoothening.

With a REAL cake with filling and all, I wasn't too sure of the pressure I could apply. And the thought of destroying the cake at the 11th hour was too stressful. So I tried to do my best and made more grass to cover the bottom of the cake.

When OCT saw my gumpaste figurine, he commented that it didn't have the feature of a tiger. So I made another figurine after putting on all the fondant cut outs on the cake. It was already 2am when I got to that. And it took me a good 30 minutes to make the tiger. Since my first gumpaste figurine was not going to be a tiger, I turned it into a baby bear. Can you see the letter B on his chest? B = BABY also B = BOY! I let the second figurine dry overnight before painting  it.

The next day when we got up, OCT who claimed to be a better artist offered to add the details and paint the tiger. Now that we have 2 figurines, I couldn't decide which one to use. Clearly OCT thought his tiger was better, but I thought my baby bear was really cute too. So I put the two of them in a different container to let Grace choose which one she preferred as the topper. :)

In the end, both of them were put on the cake! It's a happy ending. :)

On hindsight, I should have added more details on top of the cake. But I was trying not to be over ambitious with my first attempt.

It was definitely a good learning experience and I am glad that I did it.:)