Sculpted Bunny Cake

If you remember back on my first week at the CIA I met Derek Corsino, head chef and owner of Corsino Cakes, a gourmet cake bakery out of Wappingers Falls, NY. Derek graduated from the bachelor's program at the CIA in 2009 and has gone on to not only start his own successful business, but also appear on Food Network Challenge three times. He was so approachable the day I met him at the cake competition here that I emailed him to set up a workshop for classmates and I to supplement our CIA experience. I will take classes on cakes here, but we don't use fondant or gumpaste until after I return from my externship, and sculpting is not in the curriculum at all. Since cake decorating is obviously a huge interest of mine, I decided to take matters into my own hands. Derek and I designed a sculpted cake workshop for my class together over email. And then four of my classmates and I made the short trip to his bakery one Monday to sculpt and decorate a bunny cake at his direction.

We started out by talking about the different structural support that he uses and what we were using for the bunny cake. It was a pretty simple sculpted cake, but making the ears stand up required some hardware. Attached to the cake board were a male and female receptor to hold the PVC pipe vertically, and then wire was attached to the pipe with putty to form the ears.

We sliced his high-ratio (high fat content) vanilla cake and stacked it with Italian buttercream to make the head shape.

 From this step we carved into the stack to shape the head, and then put a crumb coating of  buttercream on to smooth the surface.

Next, he showed us his method for covering a cake in fondant and adding texture to make it look realistic.

We rolled out fondant to make the ears, eyes, mouth and nose, and he finished his with green grass.

His finished product.

My finished product.

Katie and Carlie with their bunny.

The whole crew!