Here is a cake for a kid who doesn't have a favorite superhero. We have the Hulk, Spiderman, Captain America, and Ironman each taking a quarter of the cake. This is not my favorite look, but this is what John-John wanted. Although the poor thing caught Covid-19 so I had to freeze the cake when the party was postponed. :-(
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The cake started with me making a bunch of cutters using my nifty 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.
I made a cutter for the Hulk fist. It is a chunky, open hand cutter. I cut and separated the fingers a little, drew in some lines in the palm, made lines for the knuckles and finger nails, and then I folded over the fingers to make the fist. Easy Peasy. But you don't really need a 3D cutter to make the hand, you can just use a paper template.
Looks like Hulk is hitchhiking here.
I made a cutter for the Ironman mask, and made a cutter/embosser combo for the "heart".
I made some circle cutters and a star for the Captain America shield. I could have used other circle cutters I had, but it is easier to make cutters that are perfectly sized for what I want rather than hunt around for random circle cutters that would fit the job. I know, I'm lazy.
I had a little oops moment with the Spiderman section.
I made both the spider and the spider web in black. When I placed the black spider on the black spider web it just didn't look right. The spider was hardly visible. I tried replacing the black spider web with a white one, but the black fondant strings had stained the red fondant so I couldn't remove it without creating a mess. As a workaround I used the Cricut Design Space Software and made an offset bubble around my spider image and then made a cutter of the offset. (The black is the original image, and the red is the offset bubble.) And you need to make an offset bubble because just enlarging the cutter size and stacking them on top of each other doesn't work. (Been there, tried it, believe me it didn't work.)
Here are the two cutters.
I cut the bubble spider from white fondant, place the actual black fondant spider on top of that, and then placed the two on top of the black spider web. The white buffer between the black web and black spider made the spider a little more visible. Next time (if there is a next time) I will make the spider web white, silver, or gray.
The cake itself is an 8" chocolate cake covered in chocolate ganache. To cover it in fondant I cut a wedge of fondant (one in each of the 4 colors) that matched 1/4 of the cake. I'm sure there is a better way to do this, but this is what I came up with.
After placing the fondant wedge on the cake there was a little bit of bunching at the corner edge, but I just trimmed it off and smoothed the fondant so the cut section was hardly noticeable. I wasn't worried about the gap between the sections because I knew that would be covered with black fondant trim.
But I miscalculated on the size of my wedge and ended up with the yellow section being too small and the gray section being too large. Oops. Note: I made the black edging using my handy ACE extruder.
To hide the mistake I did what any respectable cake decorator would do - I hid it under fondant. In this case I made some fancy yellow braided trim using a pie crust impression mat and covered the problem area. See - problem gone. Note: the blue bead looking trim on the Captain American side also used the pie crust impression mat.
For the lettering on the name plate I used FMM's Art Deco Upper Alphabet set. I haven't had much luck making little cutters like this with my 3D printer. I also dusted Hulk's fist and the grout lines between the bricks with a little black petal dust. The black dust just accentuates the markings and makes them more obvious.
So here is the finished cake showing each section in all its glory. I hope John-John gets better soon so I can see how the fondant decorations handle the freezer.
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