Recently I had the privilege to make the cake for our friends Adam and Tiffany's little boy, Sylas' first birthday! The theme was Jack's Big Music Show and since Adam plays the drums I knew I wanted to make the drums and Mel the focal point on top of the cake. The first step was to make the edible drums which actually turned out to be a lot more simple then I thought. Here is what I needed
I used my circle cutters, sized on my 6" cake pan to figure out what sizes each of the drums and symbols should be. These were purchased online and range from 1/4"-3" in size. The next step was to roll out my yellow fondant at the thickness I wanted each drum head to be. I cut those out, then rolled a much thinner piece of fondant to cut the symbols. This is what I ended up with
The drum heads ended up being about 1/2" thick and worked out perfect. I laid them aside and let them dry for about an hour. I made 2 extra symbols because attaching them was going to be tricky. To put the pieces together I used some sturdy floral wire and fondant glue (aka water) then supported everything with clean paper towels until it could all dry and harden. I let the whole set dry for the week then painted them and attached white drum heads and the symbols (the best way I found was just using a wad of fondant under the symbol to hold it onto the wire.) You'll see the final product on the cake at the bottom.
Now on to making the characters, the characters are actually pretty simple. When I am making sculpture type pieces for cakes I always try to break them down to the simpler shapes. In this case the heads are basically spheres with a slightly pointed front for the face, and the bodies are cylinders. I made Jack first, rolled the light blue fondant into a ball and pointed the nose a little.
Then I cut in a mouth, if you've seen the show its all about the characters singing in a band, so the mouths had to be open!
The two smaller balls of fondant you see to the right are going to be the ears, I simply pressed down on them with my finger and then put the indentions in to the pieces and attached them to the head. Next I made the nose and eyes out of black fondant which really brought his face to life.
I used the same steps to make Mary's head and Mel's (forgot to take a progress pic of just Mel's finished head) They turned out so cute!
The red cylinder in the back is my first attempt at making Mary's body. I pretty much just shaped it into the cylinder free hand, and used Jack's head to size it.d head)
Next was Mel's body which is colored a lime green, little bit of yellow and more green. Added to my white fondant. Then I enlisted my assistant (aka my husband) to help me color Jack's body, which is a light peachy pink color, so he mixed a pea size ball of red into a golf ball size ball of white fondant. The finished product looked like this:
I added a yellow heart to Mary and the stripes to Mel, and added the legs and arms and instruments later. Everything was assembled on site and this was the final product:
Close ups of the characters with arms, legs and instruments attached...
This one was done for my friend Jessica's 30th birthday last August. She told me she liked purple and her favorite flowers list included gerber daisies, as soon as I heard that this design came to mind. The gerbers and the "30" were made ahead of time out of fondant so that they could set up. Because gerber daisies have thicker petals no gumpaste was necessary. The original flowers were a little pale so I hand painted each one so the colors would be more intense! To paint them I mixed icing color with some vodka (so that it will dry faster and be less likely to run/smear). In order to get the cupped shape right for the flowers I used cupcake cups that I smashed with my had a little. This cake in particular definitely taught me to go with the flow, things did not go quite as I planned but I think the end result was better than the idea I had in the first place.
