Should've Done Sunday: Mother's Day Debacle

Actually, I may have made this cake for a birthday, but I was trying to replicate the design of a Mother's Day cake pictured in one of my cake decorating books. It's one of the first cakes I covered in rolled fondant. I was living in the UK at the time and enrolled in a basic sugarcraft course, but I had only ever used buttercream or some other type of frosting to ice a cake, so this was totally new to me.

Rolled fondant has since become very popular over here in the States, but it's not as readily available. When I made this cake nearly 14 years ago, I covered it with Regal-Ice, which I bought (comparatively cheaply) from the local grocery store. Here in the US, we have to either order off the internet or go to specialty cake decorating supply stores to get decent rolled fondant. I don't know if we'll ever see tubs of Satin Ice on the shelves at Publix.

Anyway, for this cake, not only was I a rolled fondant beginner, but I obviously had no clue what I was doing with the piping either. I vaguely recall just kind of making it up as I went along. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but this is another picture that makes me cringe. However, I had a lot of fun decorating this cake, and I think I was at least minimally proud of it at the time, and that's ultimately what matters. Like with art, I believe it's more about the process than the product. Especially when you consider that unlike art, in cake decorating the product gets eaten.

Oh, and I apologize for the poor picture quality. I made this cake long before I had a digital camera, so these are old fashioned, had-to-get-the-film-developed photos. At some point I thought them worthy to be included in my cake scrapbook, hence the awkward cropping. To post here, I had to use a scanner, and unfortunately, they came out a bit crooked and washed out.

This Should've Done Sunday cake has a small cluster of hand molded sugarpaste roses in the center. They're brushed, rather ineptly, with petal dust for color. Along the sides of the cake are some blossoms I made using my plunger cutters, and they also divide sections of the top border. I'm not sure what I was thinking with that. I was apparently trying to so some sort of overpiping, but I have no clue why I chose those colors. It also looks as though the icing is too thin, or something. The bottom border is the result of me trying to make shells before I knew how to make shells. I then topped off the uneven mess with stars. There was some space left on the cake board, so I filled it in with blobs. I guess I didn't feel like it was really cake decorating unless I squeezed a lot of icing out of a bag.

Just for comparison, here's what I was going for.

Obviously the colors on mine are all wrong, and I had no idea how to make fondant swags or bows, so I opted for overly-busy mystery borders. The cake pictured in the book is simple, and much more elegant than the one I made. Here's what I should've done with mine:

• Used only one or two colors. I don't know why there's such a mess of mismatched hues, unless I was struggling with matching the icing colors, which is why you always need to color enough icing to do the job. If you run out, trying to match that exact color is a nightmare. 
• Left off the top border. You can't really tell in the picture, but the edge is crimped, and then there's a mess of piping on top of that. I'd still do the crimping, but that's all.
• The blossoms on the side are fine, but to make it look more like the cake from the book, I should've had more of them in a continuous swag.
• The bottom border needs to be smaller and simpler. Properly made shells or a bead border would work, but without the irregular and uneven row of stars on top.
• The weird pink blobs with green stars in between need to disappear.

I think there were a few wrinkles in the fondant along the bottom of the cake, which is why I piped so much of a bottom border on it. Other than that, I'm happy with how I covered it. I just wish I hadn't made such a wreck out of decorating it. Still, as best as I can remember, it tasted good. That's the cool thing about cake. I doesn't have to be decorated at all, much less well, to taste good.

Should've Done Sunday: Girly and Garish

I have a real debacle for this week's Should've Done Sunday. Let's go back in time 12, maybe 13 years. I was desperate to practice all the techniques I learned taking the Wilton courses, but I didn't have that many reasons to make cakes. I also wanted to build up a portfolio of cakes I had decorated to show people what I could do, but at that time I only had maybe six pictures. I knew that professionals sometimes used styrofoam as dummy cakes to decorate, so I scrounged around the house looking for some and manage to fashion what resembled a three tier cake with some careful trimming and glue.

I remember wanting to make an ivory wedding cake, but I didn't have any ivory icing color. For some inexplicable reason, I thought that just adding half a drop of pink would do the trick. Well, it didn't. Half a drop of pink makes... pink. What was I thinking? I'm not a fan of pink, as anyone who knows me will attest. But yet, here I was with however many recipes of icing colored pastel pink, so I had to go with it. Check out this monstrosity.

There are so many things wrong with this cake that I'm not even sure where to begin, but I'll point out the positives real quick so you guys don't think I'm just an over-critical control freak who can only focus on the negative aspects of any given situation. Even though it's true.

• The roses are decent, and I like the pink and white combination. They could've been better arranged on the top, but for the most part I'm happy with them. 
• I did a great job on the stringwork. I enjoy doing stringwork for some reason, I just don't get the chance to do it very often. Even the zigzag swags are adequate, and the drop strings are okay.
• The icing, for the most, part is smooth. This is no small feat considering that proper cake dummies are made to be smooth, but I CUT this styrofoam to size, so the edges and sides were all jaggy with little styrofoam pellets sticking out and falling off. 

Okay, now for all the the things I should've done differently.

• Even though this is styrofoam and very light, I should've put it on a proper board, covered in freezer paper or something, not a flimsy piece of whatever-that-is wrapped in aluminum foil. Ugh.
• About the color. I should've added half-a-drop of pink to a small amount of icing rather than the entire batch. I would have realized then that my grand notion of making ivory from pink wasn't going to work and could have used plain white. Or, I should've gone the traditional route and just bought some ivory icing color.
• I hate the top border on the bottom tier. It looks like I was going for an e motion border with a round tip, but I think it looks out of place when all the other borders are made with star tips.
• The shells suck. Why are they going different directions? Not quite sure why or what was wrong with me that day, but I should've made them better or used a simple bead border instead.
• My basketweave work on the top tier also sucks. Big time. This is what happens when you don't take the time to properly divide your cake or use spacer dots when making basketweave.
• I think the sweet peas hanging over the edge of the top tier are supposed to help cover up the shoddy basketweave, but they're not all that well done either, so they look dreadful. The whole cake would look a lot better without the top tier, actually.
• I'm not convinced about the my choice of green for the leaves. On the one hand, it is a nice contrast, but I really think it's too dark and I should've used a lighter shade.
• I'm also on the fence when it comes to the mini drop flowers I used with the stringwork. There needed to be something there to hide where the strings meet, but now I'm thinking some drop beads or something a little more elegant would look better. Especially if I had used a simple bead border instead of those irregular and unsightly shells. 

Okay, your turn! What did I miss? Please feel free to be brutally honest here, as I truly hate this cake. I almost didn't even use it because I'm that embarrassed by it, so you don't have to worry about hurting my feelings. What else is wrong with this debacle of a design?