I'm a little late, but it's time for the fall edition of the Pinterest Challenge, dreamed up by Katie Bower of Bower Power to encourage everyone to stop pinning and start doing.
My friends Kat and Brandon were getting married, and they hired Sugar Whim to make cupcakes and a cutting cake for their ceremony. Kat and Brandon are extremely laid back, and gave me free reign on the design. Their wedding was a really cool bohemian carnival theme, and I wanted the cake to have stripes. I thought about using fondant, but it's heavy, it doesn't taste very good, and it's a real pain in the derriere to work with. So I googled pictures of striped cakes, and I found my pinspiration in white modeling chocolate.
This video video is super sweet, but frustratingly uninstructive. Also, I found that modeling chocolate is close to $20/pound, even more than fondant. My modeling chocolate dreams were dashed, until I discovered the geniuses at The Crafty Penguin. Geniuses? Maybe angels. Penguin angels. I swore I heard singing. Not only do they give a tutorial on how to make the striped modeling chocolate, they give recipes too. Modeling chocolate is surprisingly easy to make! Not that expensive either, just corn syrup and colored or white chocolate melting discs. I won't give all the details here because those crafty penguins do a much better job than I could, and I forgot to take "during" pictures.
I made my modeling chocolate in white, black, and red. First I made the roses, just like you would make roses with fondant and gum paste, but these are completely edible. The consistency is pretty similar to a 50/50 fondant gum paste mix, but a little harder to work with because it can melt if you handle it too much. Luckily it was a nice, brisk October wedding. I brushed the roses with gold edible luster dust. See how the edges kind of sparkle?
The cake was pumpkin with hints of pineapple and sweet potato, with brown sugar buttercream icing. I didn't want the stripes to be perfect, because it was supposed to be charming and bohemian. In my mind, that means messy stripes.
I also made 50 cupcakes each of cannoli cupcakes (yellow), pumpkin chocolate chip (blue) and dark chocolate with raspberry frambroise cream cheese icing (pink).
I printed out pictures of circus elephants, strong men, and lion tamers (but later realized they were tiger tamers, which makes them even more awesome) on card stock and cut them out. Then I attached them with tape to toothpicks to create my cupcake toppers.
Kat used pinterest to organize her wedding decor ideas and here's a little extra pinterest challenge by Kat: paper flower orbs. How pretty!
To see the Pinterest Challenge results from Sherry, Katie, Carmel and Sarah, click here.
Have you ever seen the end of My Cousin Vinny? Of course you have. I'm referring to the part where Mona Lisa Vito reveals to Vinny that she got help from one of Vinny's friends in New York, and he's disappointed he didn't win the case on his own. I couldn't have made this cake or cupcakes without the help of a few special people. Becky, who helped me bake tray after tray of cupcakes in the Baking Powder Fiasco of 2012, and Hannah, who helped me figure out how to smooth out modeling chocolate in a noodle maker at 1:30 in the morning. Ladies, you rock.
Additional special thanks go out to Randy, Dorian, Joan, and Riley, who helped me set up the cupcakes while I assembled the cake, right before the wedding started.
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