Royal Baby Shower Cake

I recently finished up my first class at the CIA on the other side of my externship, Confectionery Arts. It's a class that I've been looking forward too since I started pastry school because of the chance to experiment with cake decorating mediums I might not use on my own like chocolate, pulled sugar, and the royal icing string work featured on today's cake:

This is a dummy cake that was a partner build, and I worked on it over the course of two classes with my teammate Emma. The design was assigned to us by our chef and we made all the decorating elements by hand. It's covered in light blue rolled fondant and the darker blue pieces coming off of the sides are made from gum paste. All of the white on the cake is Royal Icing. Because of our color choices I thought it ended up looking a bit like it belonged as a centerpiece to a swanky shower for a new mama-to-be!

Royal icing is the type of decorating medium that is a jack of all trades. It can be used as a rock hard drying glue, a paint to embellish cakes and fill in stencils, or delicately piped strings suspended in air as seen on this cake here. String work is a very old school technique for cake decorating but it's something that I've always wanted to try my hand at. Royal icing strings are a tedious business, but I think it is a gorgeous way to embellish a cake. Let's get a close up on those strings:

My teammate Emma also made this sweet sugar sculpture (pun intended) to sit a top this beauty while I went a little cross-eyed dropping all of those strings. 

Our result was definitely a style much different from the type of cakes I normally do, but so delicate and beautiful. I will definitely use Royal icing as a medium for wedding cakes again, especially lace or detailed piping. 

Red Ruffle Wedding Cake

Recently this white ruffle dummy cake that I made a while ago just started looking so white to me. When I made it originally I contemplated making the flowers different colors but decided the white on white design looked elegant as it was. But enough of that, it's cold outside now and the design needed a splash of warm color. I hand painted the edges red and took pictures in stages to show how the balance of red and white came through. Some of my favorites are from when I was only about halfway through, because the remaining white ruffles really pop. 

I used gel food coloring and a small straight edge paint brush. A design like this would definitely be much cleaner if I had colored the flowers from the get-go isntead and dipped the edges of the ruffles before adhering them to the cake.

The result is a pretty startling difference and completely transformed the feel of the design. It's a perfect example of how you can add color to a traditional wedding cake and end up with a very original - but still elegant - cake design.