Last week I decided to give cake decorating a bit of a try! Having never used the plastic icing before I was a little hesitant, however with a lot work and a bit of help the effort was well worth it.
For those of you that have a Cricut machine, you may find it very useful to use some of the patterns on your cartridges to cut a pattern for your cake. I used one of the guitars from the Hannah Montanna cartridge. This is where the Gypsy comes in really handy to work out the size of the pattern against the size or your board or base to put it on.
I then baked my mud cakes for the actual cake, I selected the Betty Crocker packet mud cake, as this was a good solid base for the icing, and it is a really nice cake too!
With a really sharp knife I cut out the pattern, my cake was in three pieces, then I frosted it together. I made a vanilla butter frosting and covered the whole cake.
Once frosted, I was ready to embark on the black plastic icing. I have to say this was the part that scared me the most, it was not as hard as I thought, once I worked out how to roll it out without sticking it to the bench! As I was decorating the majority of the top of the cake, I covered it in 3 pieces, and once finished your really couldn't see it!
This is where I left it until the following night, where I broke out the Cricut Cake machine and decorated the rest of the Guitar. The Cricut cake tool kit is a must, it was so useful. I used the brush to cover the cutting mat in a thin layer of margarine to hold the icing on. Brush it on until it is basically clear and you can't see any yellow!
Rolling out the white plastic icing for the main part on the guitar took a couple of tries before getting it to the perfect thickness (which was quite thin), it cut beautifully, and was easy to remove from the mat.
I layered this onto the top of the cake, using some apricot jam as my glue! The small white part I set aside to paint in edible silver paint. It is the section I used to adhere the strings at the base of the guitar. I hand cut the frets, and knobs, buttons for the guitar and had painted these also.
Positioning these onto the cake, took great patience and the majority of the time, carefully placing each one, glueing with jam! I also used toothpicks for holding the knobs onto the side of the guitar.
I used little silver cachous to add the silver embellishments just under the strings, and metallic silver thread for the strings. I was very happy to see it finished, and my son, even happier the next morning. I also have to say, so many people commented on how cool our cake was at the skating rink that day!
I hope this inspires you to make a cake outside your comfort zone, and like me find it is not that hard at all, using the Cricut certainly made life easier.
I will post more step by step photos in my gallery.
Love Life & Create
Michelle
