Spidey and His Amazing Friends Cake

I like it when a cake look complicated but is actually easy to make.  Take this cake inspired by the Spidey and His Amazing Friends cartoon.  It is a three tiered 10", 8" and 6" cake which would serve about 74.

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The best (and easiest) part of the cake are the plastic Spidey and His Amazing Friends figures.  It is so much easier just to plop some plastic toys on the cake rather than trying to make them out of fondant.  I'm not a very good artist, so my 3D sculptures look sad and pathetic. 

For the bottom tier I cut the building shapes out of Wilton's white fondant mixed with Gum-Tex/Tylose Powder. The powder stiffens the fondant and makes it dry to a rock-hard consistency.  The more powder you add the quicker it will dry and the harder it will become.  I don't measure the Gem-Tex, I just dip a piece of fondant into the container of Gum-Tex so it coats the fondant surface, then I kneed the powder into the fondant.  I do this until the fondant is no longer sticky.  If a piece will be free-standing, I add more Gum-Tex, but if the piece just needs to be a little firm, I add less Gum-Tex.  

I made 3D cutters for the building shapes.  I love my Ender 3D printer.  If you want to read more about 3D printers you can check out this post.  

Below are the outlines I used for the buildings.  My bottom tier was about 4-1/2" tall, so I scaled the buildings so the largest was about 1/2 taller than the bottom tier.  If you don't have a 3D printer, you  can just cut the buildings out by hand using a Sculpey straight blade.  I mixed the white fondant with the Gum-Tex, rolled out the fondant, cut the shapes, and allowed them to dry flat.  I then used an edible black marker to outline the shapes and add the windows.  At first I tried drawing everything freehand, but my lines were so wobbly I had to use a ruler to make the lines straight. 

For the spider web I used the image below and just created the cutter from the outer edge.  The web lines were drawn using a finer tipped side of the black edible marker.

For the center tier, I tinted the buttercream using Wilton's No-Taste Red food gel, and used the pattern below for the eyes. The outer area was cut with Wilton's black fondant, and the center section with white fondant.  For the black ropes that make up the "web" on the center tier, I use an A.C.E. food safe extruder to get the ropes nice and even.  I'm not sure if the food-safe version is still sold (it had different nut/bolts than the clay extruder), but you can get the polymer clay version here.  You can also use just a regular (cheap-o) clay extruder, but they tend to break after just a few uses.  Amazon also sell the sturdier gun style clay extruder, but I'm not sure how well they work.  I've been using my ACE extruder for years without any problems, so I know that one work.

For the top tier I tinted white frosting a soft stone-gray color, and then made fondant shaped bricks out of a slightly darker gray.  I put the structure on top of the tier to help hold Spiderman as he swings on his web.  The web is just embroidery floss.

The cake sit atop a 14" cake drum, and the lettering is FMM Funky Alphabet in Upper and Lower case.

So all-in-all this was a pretty easy cake to construct.

Happy Decorating,

Carol