Hedwig Cake - Cutest and Easiest Cake to Make

How cute is this little Hedwig Smash Cake???!!!!  And it was so easy to make.  Cut a few fondant circles, pipe on some "feathers" and you are done!

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The cake itself is a three layer 5" cake.  (These 5" Fat Daddio pans are the perfect size for a smash cake.)  With the three layers the cake was about 6" tall.  At first I thought it would be too tall, but in the end I think the added height gave the cake a more majestic look

First step to this Hedwig was to stack and crumb coat the cake and then put it in the refrigerator to chill.  While chilling, I cut some circles out of black, yellow, and white fondant.  I have a bunch of different circle cutters and I just used the one that looked the best.  The biggest circle was the black at the bottom, then a slightly smaller circle in yellow, then a black circle, and finally I cut a small circle in white using tiny circle cutters.  (I love these tiny circle cutters - they come in so handy).  

Stack the circles to form the eyes...

...and then place the eyes on the cake.  But make sure the eyes are even and the white dots are pointing the the same direction - unless you want a cross-eyed Hedwig.

Then using a Wilton #21 Open Star piping tip, I started piping on the feathers.  In the photo below you can see what NOT to do.  I just piped regular stars and realized that they didn't look right.  They look like little flowers instead of elongated feathers.

To pipe a regular frosting star, you apply pressure to the bag and place a dot of frosting on the cake.  With the dot in place, you then release the pressure on the bag as you quickly pull the tip away.  This gives you a compact, pointed star.  In contrast, to pipe a feather you want to apply the dot of frosting but then slowly release the pressure on the bag as you pull the tip down and away from the dot.  This gives you an elongated tail attached to the dot of frosting.

Once you get the hang of the piping technique, pull up a chair, flex your wrist, and start piping around and around the cake.  Near the eyes I reduced the size of my dots and piped smaller feathers.

On top of the cake I piped more upright, spikey feathers.  For the eyebrows I used a Wilton #48 Basket Weave tip.  I put on one layer of eyebrows, but I didn't think the eyebrows stuck out far enough so I added another layer of frosting on top of the first.

The nose is just an elongated piece of black fondant that I pushed into the buttercream.

For a final touch I added some claws/toes for Hedwig and a red and gold scarf.  For the scarf I rolled out some red and shimmer gold fondant, and then I used a knit-like texture mat to make the fondant look like knitted yarn.  I cut the fondant into squares and then formed a long, continuous scarf by squishing two edges of two squares together.  The final step was to make fringe on the ends of the scarf by using a straight edge blade to cut 5 slices into the end squares.  

I wrapped the scarf around the base of Hedwig and stuck it under his claw.

See wasn't that easy!!  And best of all everyone fell in love with it.

Happy Decorating,

Carol

The Simpsons Cake - Homer and His Donuts

Making this cake wasn't as difficult or time consuming as it looks because all of the Simpson figures are plastic toys.  I love it when cakes are easy.... although I did make the sofa, tv, and the donuts out of fondant.

Here are the plastic figures - aren't they cute!

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To make the sofa, tv, and donuts I use my super cool Creality Ender 3 V2 3D printer to make cutter sets for each object.  My 3D printer is my favorite cake decorating tool.  If you want to read more about it, click HERE.

For the donuts, I uploaded the shapes below to the CookieCad design tool which in turn generated an STL file.  The STL file is then sent to a "slicer" program which generates a .GCODE file specific to your 3D printer.  Finally the .GCODE file is sent to the 3D printer and the cookies cutters printers.  Easy right???    FYI: I used 3.25" donuts for this cake.

For the donut I started by tinting white Wilton fondant with a little bit of Ivory gel food color to give a light tan color.  The "icing" of the donut was made with pink fondant.  I mixed white and pink fondant together to get a paler shade of pink.  First I used my donut frosting cutter to cut the pink frosting and then used the "mouth/teeth" cutter to cut the "bite" out of just the pink frosting layer.  Then I positioned the pink frosting on top of the tan donut.  

Next I matched up the mouth cutter with the cutout in the pink frosting, and then cut through the tan part of the donut.  I tried cutting the pink frosting and tan donut together, but the pink got smeared into the tan of the donut which didn't look very good.  

The sprinkles on top of the donut are just pieces of thinly rolled fondant.

I made the TV from another cookie cutter set, but you could just cut the pieces from a paper temple.  I just get a kick out of making the cutters.  Below is the template I used to make my TV 4-1/2" wide.  

I used purple and black fondant mixed with Tylose power (which makes the fondant harden) to make the body of the TV.  For the TV screen I rolled out white gum paste and glued a printed "Happy Birthday Madison" image to the gum paste using a glue dot runner.  After the image was glued to the gum paste, I used the TV screen cutter to cut out the gum paste, and then I placed the TV screen on the main body of the TV.   And just to give the TV some pizzazz, I added some finishing touches to the knobs and the speaker.  I also dusted the speaker with some brown food power to give it some depth.  For the TV antenna, I used some thin wire, but I should have used something thicker because the wire didn't show up very well.  

For the sofa I used Wilton Brown fondant mixed with Tylose.  I again made a set of cutters, but you could just use a paper template.  I made the sofa about 5-1/2" long, but it was actually a little small when compared to the size of the toys, but the top tier of my cake was only 6" so I couldn't make the sofa any larger.  I made a cutter for the back of the sofa, the base of the sofa, a cutter for the arm rest, and a cutter to make the three cushions sitting on the base of the sofa.

Sorry I didn't take a better picture of the sofa.  Once each sofa piece was cut, it glued them together with a dab of water.

To tint the buttercream for the base tier, I use Electric Green and a touch of Leaf Green to tone the bright color down a bit.  For the top tier I used Electric Blue and a touch of Navy Blue.  The border abound the base of the cakes was made using a Wilton pie crust pearl mold.

Once the cakes were stacked and the border attached, it was just a matter of placing the plastic figures on the cake.  There is a bit of fondant under the figures to keep them from touching the buttercream and to help them stay in place.  

So here is the finished cake.  Don't you just love The Simpsons!

Happy Decorating,

Carol