While I was at work yesterday my latest order for the bakery - a mold to make cakes and a "star tip" for doing icing in 1:48 scale from Stewart Dollhouse Creations - arrived in my mail (I actually stopped by the house real quick as I was moving some merchandise from one of our sites to the other since I'm only 2 blocks from the one because I knew it should be there and couldn't wait to open it up!). The last batch of cupcakes I "baked" were waiting for the star tip so that I could do the frosting in rosettes and of course I've got a bunch of cakes to make for the bakery as well. While I did make a few baked goods for the North Pole Tea Room, I hadn't done anything as involved or detailed as whole 1:48 scale cakes. Of course, me being me, I didn't want just nice plain pretty colored cakes.... oh no, I pinned cakes with fondant decorations and fancy piping and all sorts of stuff. I did try to be a little realistic in what I thought was even conceivably possible for me to do in that small of a scale, but even at that apparently I have high expectations for myself....... Having said that, being the stubborn headed crafter that I am, I decided to do the most difficult one as my very first cake. In the long run, I'm kind of glad that I did because now they should be much easier and less frustrating to make (so I think anyway...... we'll see......). This particular cake was a 2 tier round cake with fondant pink rose petals covering the bottom tier and the upper tier white frosting with white curly cues piped onto it and a pink fondant flower set to one side at the top edge. So of course that meant making teeny tiny "fondant" petals out of clay (which I should probably preface all of this by saying I've worked with clay a little bit before but not much.). Seemed easy enough in theory, however in practice it became a lot more frustrating than I thought it might be. In the end I ended up making the petals a bit bigger compared to the overall cake size than in the picture of the real life cake I was modeling it after, but I'm still happy with how it turned out. I went through several different trials and errors before I finally figured out how to make it work...... my initial idea about how to do it was to form the little petals then bake them, and then glue them to the pre-baked cake form. I was having a horrible time getting these tiny thin pieces of clay from the mat that I was forming them on to a piece of baking parchment to bake them without destroying them. So then I thought maybe I can form them directly onto the cake and then bake them in place, I figured those few extra minutes wouldn't hurt the cake.... but then that did not work at all either trying to get them to look right forming them on the cake. Finally I figured out that if I used the bottom of one of the molds I have I could form them and bake them on the same surface and then glue them to the cake.
This is what I ended up doing for the final product, but even that took a little bit of figuring out how best to get them formed just right (and also to accept that if I wanted to not go crazy I was going to have to settle for fewer, bigger petals lol).
The original cake also had the petals smoothed over the top edge and covering the top of the bottom tier as well, but I knew that wasn't going to successfully happen here so I just painted the top the same light pink as the petals. Then it was on to the top tier. I wasn't too concerned about piping the curly cues..... I'd already had some practice with the syringes for the mini baked goods and of course tons of experience piping real life frosting designs.... and that went easily, as I expected, but then I was back to needing to form the clay to look like fondant decoration for the flower. This time I went straight to using the bottom of a mold to form the pieces on and without too much trouble ended up with what I thought would be an okay sized flower, baked it and then glued it in place on the cake. And I have to say I am pretty happy with how it turned out.... .definitely pretty proud of myself for my very first 1:48 scale cake.
I also used the star tip to finish off the cupcakes that I had already made and were just waiting for their frosting. I used the star tip to pipe little rosettes in yellow frosting, which turned out cute as well, so I just have to get another tray painted and glue them on and they will be done.
I'll probably do at least 2 more batches of cupcakes for the bakery, I'm just not sure exactly how I want them to look ("flavor" of the cupcakes and color and technique for the frosting). As of right this moment I have a bottom and a top tier already baked for a white square cake, so I have to figure out how I want to decorate that cake and then make some more cakes and decorate them.
I really really want to have some fancy cookies in the bakery as well, but I'm not sure how I'm going to accomplish that. I made just round cookies for the Tea Room so I could do that again, but I really would like to have some cookies in fancy shapes...... I'm looking into the possibilities of a couple different possible options for that, so we'll see what I can come up with :)
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