This cake was inspired by Coco (the movie) and The Day of the Dead celebrations. The party had a Fiesta theme, but the birthday girl asked for a black cake with a sugar skull and leaves/marigold petals like in the movie Coco. This is what the Goth girl ended up with!
<< Disclosure: We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to ear fees by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites.>>The skull was made from cardstock using my Cricut Air Explorer. I usually only use the Cricut to cut letters and text to go the the cake drum, so this topper was a little out of my comfort zone. It took me forever! Each color had to be cut separately and then glued together.
The gum paste rose took a lot of time to make too. I used a cutter and CK Rose Petal Veining Tool that put deep ridges in the rose petals. Do you think the marks kind of resemble tooled leather??? It is a strange look, but I think I like it.
I also made the banner ahead of time. I used these
floral wooden stamps to make the impression in the fondant, and then I used a banner shaped cutter to cut out about the impression. I made the 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.
For the marigold petals I used a
daisy veining tool and a set of cutters I made with the 3D printer. It took about 30 minutes to print the four sizes of the daisy cutter, and it cost about 10 cents in 3D filament.
The cake itself is covered in Wilton's Black Fondant. I started with a nice base of white chocolate ganache. I use Callebaut chocolate that I buy in 25lb bags from a local restaurant supply place. This 10" x 5" cake took about 20 ounces of chocolate to cover. I also use CakeSafe acrylic rounds to get the sharp edges and straight sides. I have a blog post HERE explaining how I use them. A lot of decorators can get their cakes to look like this with just a few minutes of smoothing, but I'm a spaz and I need the crutch of my acrylic disks. And yes, I deliberately placed the cake off-center on the 12" black cake drum. I wanted and little extra room in the front for decorations.
Here is my soft Wilton Black Fondant rolled out to about 18 inches round. It looks fine doesn't it?
But I ended up with horrible cracking around the top edge. There was a lot of torn/ripped sections on the side too. I normally don't use Wilton to cover a cake, I only use it for fondant accents, but Wilton was the only black fondant I could buy locally. I typically use Carma Massa but you can't get it in black, and adding food gel doesn't work. I could have used
Renshaw black fondant, but that gets a little sticky in the heat and humidity. So I went with Wilton, and look at that horrible edge I got! So disappointing.
Here are the marigold petals going on.
To try and hid the cracking along the top edge of the cake I added a rope of bright blue fondant. (In hindsight I probably should have made the rope orange.) I used my industrial strength, food safe
ACE extruder to make the rope. When I first started decorating cakes I used a small, hand crank
clay extruder, but it was really difficult to use, it wasn't food safe, and it fell apart after just a few months. After some research I decided to shelled out $150 for the ACE extruder. The ACE has been going strong for about 3 years of constant use. It is a beast.
The second to last step in this cake decorating adventure was placing the draped banner, better know as papel picado, on the side of the cake. I was going to use little plunger cutters to cut out sections of each banner, but it didn't look right so I just left them uncut.
The roses and skull on the top went on last. I added some ribbon to the banners to make them look more festive, and I added some tiny roses that I made with a
silicone rose mold.
So here is the finished cake. I hope it doesn't look too colorful for the Goth girl.
