Bowling Alley Cake

I made this cake for a birthday party being held at a bowling alley, Rock n' Bowl in New Orleans to be exact.  It was a huge hit with the 90 year old birthday boy.  The cake is chocolate with chocolate frosting, the bowling pin are chocolate sugar cookies, and the bowling ball is a chocolate cocoa bomb.  It is a chocolate extravaganza. 

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I started this cake by making the sugar cookie bowling pins.  

I made the cookie cutter using my Creality Ender 3 v2 3D printer.  My 3D printed has become my most used cake decorating tool.  No joke.  If you want to read an intro into 3D printers for cookie cutters you can read my post HERE.    The cookies are iced with glaze (I hate Royal Icing), and the red stripes are Red Wilton fondant.  I used the JEM Strip Cutter #2 to make the red stripes the same width.  The black accent marks on the sides of the cookie were made with a Black Americolor Gourmet Writer.  This particular pen has a wide tip and draws a dense, solid line with a single stroke.  It was perfect for the look I was after.  I also used bamboo chopsticks instead of paper lollipop sticks, because I wanted/needed to pound the sticks into the cake drum to hold them in place.  

I made the "bowling ball" from white and blue candy melts swirled together and poured into a Large Half Sphere silicone mold.  I also thinned the candy melts with some paramount crystals before I swirled the colors together.  When the chocolate in half spheres hardened, I simply unmold and stuck them together using a little melted white chocolate.

The cake itself was 9x13" in size, but when I started to assemble everything I thought it looked a little short for a bowling lane.  I thought about slicing some cake off the sides and adding it on the back, but I didn't have any more frosting to stick things back together.  Instead of making more frosting, I just added 5 extra inches to the back with Styrofoam.  (I covered the Styrofoam with plastic wrap so it would touch the cake itself.  

After the cake was covered in ganache, I started to apply the fondant strips for the wooden floor of the bowling lane.  For this I used Wilton's Chocolate fondant.  I twisted a little white fondant into the brown to make the color more interesting.  After rolling out the fondant, I pressed a wood grain impression mat into the fondant, and then cut it into strips using a strip cutter.  Note the black strips on the sides are supposed to represent the gutter.

Here it is with all the "wood" strips/planks applied.

Next I applied white strips to the sides and back of the cake.  I also made some half circle molding to trim the edges.  I have a heavy-duty food safe ACE extruder to do this.  I started with a small, hand crank clay extruder, but it gave out after a few months, so I shelled out $150 for the ACE extruder. 

Next I made some red and black diamond shaped cutouts for the side of the cake, and used the ACE extruder again to make the fancy red trim for the bottom edge.

Then it was just a matter of positioning the cookie, bowling ball, stars, and gum paste confetti on the cake.  The stars are chocolate cookies, but the "90" were made using a Cricut machine. 

And here is a photo showing the back of the cake.  I don't know why I spend time decorating the back of the cake, no one every looks at it.  LOL

 So Happy 90th Birthday, Lenny!  I hope I can do your cake next year too.

Happy Decorating,

Carol