"Fade In" Movie Script Cake

Recently, Will asked me to make a cake for an event put on by the new screenwriting club at the college. The club's name is "Fade In" and he requested the cake look like a movie script. I had made a movie script cake for his birthday before and knew I wanted to improve on it if I ever made one again. Here was my chance.

• The original cake was much too rounded to look like a stack of pages. I wanted this one to look more rectangular. That was an easy fix. I changed the pan I baked it in.
• I also had problems with the icing drying too quickly before I could get it smoothed. That cake was made using buttercream icing. With this new one, I would use canned Pillsbury icing. Canned icing takes longer to dry out.
• The black decorator gel on the original cake bugged me. The color tended to "run" on the snowy white icing. This time I would use black colored icing.

To begin, I prepared one box of Pillsbury Yellow cake mix. The only adjustment I made was to use the high altitude directions (I am in Colorado). I baked it in a 13x9 AirBake pan since it was the one 13x9 pan that had the least rounded corners.

Once the cake cooled for about 10 minutes, I turned it out onto a cooling rack to cool completely. I actually turn the cake out onto the rack and then flipped to make the rounded top face up.  I've found that the easiest way to flip cake is to sandwich it between 2 baking racks, hold the racks together and then flip quickly. 

Using a long length of dental floss (un-flavored), I leveled the top of the cake. My kids love to munch on cake crust (as do I) so I save those pieces for them whenever I can.

Trim the rounded top off the cake

I covered the base of my cake carrier with foil and flipped the cake onto it so the bottom of the cake was now facing up (It keeps you from having to deal with all those crumbs from the trimmed side).

The bottom of the cake is now facing up

At this point the cake can be completely covered in white icing. I used Pillsbury Classic White since the vanilla has an off-white color. The sides should be generously iced and the top should be smoothed out as much as possible.

I used an Icing Sculptor to make the sides look more like pages. I would not recommend an icing sculptor. I had nothing but problems with it. I would instead recommend using a much more inexpensive tool such as a decorating comb. You could also just wait for the icing to dry slightly and make grooves on the side with a knife or the side of your metal spatula.

I let the white icing dry a bit before moving on to the black text. Because this is canned icing, the area in which you live can make a big difference in drying time. When I was in North Carolina, the higher humidity would make icing take longer to form a crust. In the summer, the icing never would crust. But here in Colorado with the air so dry, the canned icing formed a sufficient crust within ten minutes.

Once a crust has formed, gently press in any irregular areas around the top edges. You can also VERY LIGHTLY brush your hand across the top of the cake in sweeping motions from edge to edge to smooth the surface of the cake. Be careful doing this. Too much pressure will damage the crust and you'll have to play the waiting game again while your crust re-forms before you can continue. If you live in an area where the crust just doesn't seem to form, smooth the top of the icing as best you can with a spatula or other long straight edged tool. I have yet to achieve a perfectly smoothed iced cake top. It bugs me, but then, I don't sell my cakes so I don't fret too much over it :)

For the text, use a toothpick to trace out where you want the letters to go (I should have done this with the smaller letters as well, but I didn't). This will help you keep the piped letters straight and even.

To create the black icing for the text, I started with Pillsbury Chocolate Fudge icing and added black color gel.. You can use whatever brand or flavor icing you want, but I start with some variation of chocolate icing to achieve a black color more quickly using less color gel.

Mix the icing thoroughly and place into your decorating bag. I chose to use a decorating bag with a coupler. I was going to make text in 2 sizes so by using the coupler, I could easily change out the icing tips from the larger round tip for the large text to the smaller round tip for the small text. If you don't have decorating bags or icing tips or couplers, you can always place the black icing in two Ziploc bags. Cut a small hole in the bottom corner of one bag and cut an even smaller hole in the bottom corner of the other bag. Instant piping bags!

Using a coupler with your icing tips lets you quickly and easily change out decorating tips so you can continue to use the same bag of icing.

For the gold brads, I cut a miniature marshmallow in half and pressed them into rounded discs. Using a dampened decorating brush, I painted on gold colored Pearl Dust.

The painted brads were placed along one side of the cake top (see the main cake image for placement).

All done! Display, slice, serve and enjoy!

Will took the cake to the club function the next day. Apparently, it was very well received. Most of the cake was gone when it came back home and I hear the brownies they had available (supplied by the school) were hardly touched. Maybe they just weren't a brownie crowd...I like to think it was a very tasty cake.

Changes

I'm making changes to the template and layout of the blog, adding larger images and filling in instructions on some of the cakes that are missing them so if you run into a strangely formatted post, know I'm working to fix it :) Thanks, and happy decorating!

Ferret Shaped Cake

Among other out-of-the-ordinary-for-a-girl-her-age things, Tia loves ferrets. I can't stress that enough. She LOVES ferrets and all things ferret related. It started with a trip to the pet store one day when she decided she wanted a rabbit (we were just going to look at them, not buy one) and I pointed out the ferrets. There were two in the cage - as cute as could be and romping and playing around. Tia instantly fell in love. But, since daddy is allergic, she knows she can't have one until she grows up. That was two years ago.

Now Tia has a small collection of ferret things - toys, stuffed animals, a puppet, drawings, calendars, magazines, and even a pet store catalog that usually has an entire 3-4 pages dedicated to ferret items (cages, toys, beds, food, etc). Her favorite is "Coco", her well loved and worn Webkins ferret. In fact, Tia is our resident expert on the care and feeding of ferrets. I was quite prepared when she requested a ferret shaped cake for her 8th birthday (she's already 8?).

I had an idea about how to go about making her cake but I wanted more concrete plans. A search online didn't help much and I wound up patterning her cake after one I found on Cake Central, though that one had airbrushing on it - something I was not going to get into.

If you're unfamiliar with my cakes, I just have to mention that I try to make things as easy as possible. I like made-from-scratch cakes as much as the next person, but I spend a lot of time on decorating the cakes so when it comes to a cake project, I simply use boxed cake mix and canned icing - something anyone can just pick up at the store. You could certainly make your cake and icing from scratch and go from there but the results you see in the pictures, unless otherwise noted, are from boxed cake mix and canned icing (usually Pillsbury brand).

I realized I could just carve out the cake and ice it with a Grass and Hair decorating tip (Wilton Tip 233).

To start, I baked an entire box of cake mix in a 10 inch round cake pan. I added 1/4 cup additional flour to the mix because a) the altitude in Colorado and b) to make a denser cake (easier to carve without falling apart). I baked it for the amount of time a 13 x 9 cake calls for. It certainly rose enough...

I used the additional height to my advantage. It would mean less carving and piecing together to make the rounded body of the ferret.

I carved out the body and tail in one piece, then the head and the legs and pieced them all together. The pieces don't have to be carved perfectly. The icing has a way of rounding everything out. The leg pieces are also there to just add "bulk" to those areas and define parts.

To ice the body, I didn't want to use just plain brown. A ferret's fur, like many animals, is a mixture of several shades. I knew I didn't want to do the airbrushing. I also only wanted a hint of color change - and something that was quick and easy to do (sometimes I can be a very lazy decorator).

I decided to mix a small amount of vanilla icing into the brown chocolate icing.

I didn't want to mix it too much because I wanted there to be a hint of color change. I just marbled the two icings together.

Then I filled my decorating bag (with Tip #233) with the icing. This may seem like a lot of trouble, but it did make a big difference (I think) in the outcome of the cake.

It helps to practice a little with the Grass & Hair tip before you actually start decorating. I found that if I place the tip close to the cake surface, add pressure to the bag to start the icing flow and pull out slowly while still applying pressure (releasing the pressure once you have the "fur" the length you want), the "fur" tends to look better.

I removed the additional cake "parts" (the head and legs) and started icing the ferret cake at the tip of the tail working my way up the body. As I iced, I directed the "fur" toward the tail and toward the base instead of straight up off the cake so the ferret would look like it had fur instead of spiky hair. As I got to the place where a leg should go, I iced the area on the body and then lightly pressed the cake part into the side. Then I iced over the leg. Once I got to the neck area, I used some icing to "glue" the head to the neck.

Tia wanted a sable ferret with a mask. I only have one Grass & Hair decorating tip (who knew having 2 of them would ever come in handy) so I completed all of the brown icing fur before moving on to the white on the face. For the ears, I used a bag with no tip - just the very end snipped off - and piped them on. Basically, the ears are 2 "C" shapes. Ferrets have small ears so there didn't seem to be a need to do much else with them. I didn't have anything else on hand, so I used chocolate chips for the eyes (placed into the icing with the flat side out) and a cinnamon candy for the nose. I would have preferred mini M&Ms for the eyes or even shiny black decorating gel but this is what I had. I also was NOT going to whip up pink icing just for the little nose, though I think it would have looked better. Still, the birthday girl who stood by me the whole time the cake was being made, was happy.

Lego Mini-figure Cake

Tristan knew exactly what he wanted as his birthday cake this year. He has been so engrossed in Legos for the last three years and recently began creating Lego "videos" (stop motion photography) so it came as no surprise when he blurted out his wishes at the dinner table one night. "I want a Lego Mini figure cake! But I want the original face. No eyebrows."

"How odd," I thought, "for him to be specific about the eyebrows." But, that's Tristan. And a mini-figure cake he got! He even put together one for me with the eyes (no eyebrows), pants and shirt he wanted out of his Lego pieces. Lucky for me, he wanted a very basic "original looking" Lego man.

Tristan told me about this cake well in advance. I thought about it well in advance...then forgot about it for a couple of weeks. It's a mini-figure...how hard could it be?

I scanned for cakes having anything to do with Lego. I found a black and white drawing of a mini-figure that I downloaded and enlarge to a 8x10 size. I would use it as a template to cut out the cake pieces so at least our Lego guy would be proportional.

A couple days before his birthday, I baked a 13x9 cake and cut out the pieces using my "template". I didn't mind that the template was only 8x10. The Lego minifigure isn't flat so I planned to use some cake "scraps" to give him bulk where he needed it - mainly his head and his toes. Besides, that's PLENTY of cake to eat. The less cake we had left over, the better.

I found out the morning before his birthday as I was putting it together and trying to ice it that I had not quite planned out the creation of this cake enough.

Will emailed asking how the cake was coming along. "The cake looks like crap," was all I said about it. Icing was glopping everywhere and would NOT make a nice edge. And since I had to cut the cake so much, there were crumbs EVERYWHERE! I had only gotten the legs iced when I KNEW this was not going to work. I had to resort to the marshmallow fondant and I had to do it in a hurry! I had bought 2 bags of marshmallows just in case this happened and luckily, Tia (the marshmallow disposal system) hadn't found them. I didn't mind doing the marshmallow fondant (and actually had a sneaking suspicion it would look a lot better with fondant) but I really hoped I could get it done quickly with icing.

I had just enough time to make the fondant and put it in the fridge to rest before I had to leave to get the kids from school.

That afternoon I set to work covering the cake with fondant. The arms were wrapped separately and set next to the rest of the cake. The hands were made from rectangles of fondant that were shaped around a bottle then secured with a toothpick to the arms. It wasn't long before the kids knew what a ghost mini-figure would look like (no color).

That evening, I started painting the cake. Tristan had asked for basic colors (blue, red and of course, Lego man yellow). I wasn't too worried at this point about how he would look. The cake was coming along beautifully. The only thing that worried me was the face. It had to look perfect. I decided to make it using scraps of fondant colored black.

The areas where the mini-figure's waist and neck were looked pretty rough (the seams where the pants and shirt met and the head and shirt met) so I created a belt (and buckle) for the waist and a scarf for the neck area.

I was pretty pleased with the final product - especially considering the mess I started out with. Tristan was thrilled with the results, and that's what really mattered the most.