Turning Cake into Art
Once a year, baking for me is not simply about creating a moist sponge cake with exquisite flavours. It’s about the challenge that my daughter presents to me for her birthday (she delights in stretching my skills!).
I started baking when my son turned one year old (in fact I’d never baked a thing before that). For the next 4 years I churned out trains, space shuttles and fairy cakes with little clue as to what I was doing but shortly after my daughter’s 3rd birthday (and a princess cake I had to commission as it was beyond me at the time) I finally took a course on cake decorating. My husband’s birthday came around and the course paid off. The result was a garden cake complete with miniature carrots, aubergines and peas that I’m still incredibly proud of.
I loved this cake so much - chocolate layer cake decorated with crushed Oreos as fake dirt and cute little fondant veggies!
My technique with both buttercream and fondant was improving and my confidence blossomed. Over the years that followed came a series of increasingly complex cakes as my kids challenged me to ever greater structures! From 2 tier minion cakes to unicorn horns, to cakes with roads passing through them and fairy castles. Nothing was out of reach although each one definitely had its challenges!
The Disney/Minecraft/Fairy requests have now long since faded away with their maturing tastes but the challenges continue to come my way. In the intervening years I’ve turned to art and interior design as a career path, and so the cakes have been increasingly intricate in their design. One of my favourites was a cartoon cake - a 3D tromp l’oeil that appears from almost any angle to be flat, but in fact is not.
A deceptively effective cartoon cake
Last year I was so excited when my daughter asked me to produce a cake for her with sculpted buttercream. I was finally given the opportunity to combine my passion for painting with cake decorating to come up with a stunning 4 layer cake (red velvet and vanilla) that would be decorated using thick buttercream and a palette knife as well as piped accents. Taking inspiration from oil paintings and artists like Van Gogh, I was able to blend the icing colours of the petals and leaves to give them a gradient effect, creating a stunning 3 dimensional summer inspired bouquet. It’s definitely been one of my favourite cakes to make, even if transporting it across Kowloon to her party was a challenge in itself! I will always look forward to my daughter’s requests with a mix of intrepidation and excitement. If it wasn’t for her continually pushing me to ever harder creations I would still have been stuck with a train cake that looked like a Nailed It cake fail!
Combining palette knife art with buttercream decoration - too pretty to eat!
