Porsche Cake

Just the logo for today's cake. Maybe I'll make a replica of Dad's car next year? We'll see!

20 years ago, for his very first Father's Day, as a gift to himself, my dad bought a Porsche. I'm not really sure why, or what that has to do with being a new dad, but he really wanted one, so he got it, and it's still sitting in our garage right this very second.

Bam! Do you see how smooth that buttercream is?

But let's get back to the exciting stuff: the cake. For Father's Day '11, I went with a chocolate cake. Surprised? Yeah, me too. I thought for sure that Dad would want a plain yellow cake, or maybe lemon, but he went for something totally different and asked for chocolate. Go figure.

So chocolate he got: chocolate cake, chocolate buttercream, chocolate chips, chocolate syrup, chocolate fondant.

The baking and the buttercream-ing of the cake was the easy part. It was when the fodant came in that I started having trouble. First of all, I used Fondarific, which is a terrific, tasty, and rather expensive fondant that we use (and sell) at work. The chocolate flavor tastes a little like tootsie rolls, so that's awesome. The problem, though, is that I'm used to using a dough sheeter to roll out the fondant, and today I had to do it by hand, with a wooden rolling pin, and a lot of elbow grease.

Smooth fondant! (mostly)

Anyway, after some sweat and tears (no literal tears, but I did feel like crying at one point when I still couldn't get the fondant thin enough and I was worried I'd have to start all over again), I got the cake covered. Is it as smooth and professional as you see on the TV shows? No. But was my Dad happy? You bet. It's all about pleasing the customer, right?

The logo was a lot of fun to make (though not necessarily easy). I printed the logo from Google Images, used it to trace onto the fondant, and did the same for the center part and the red and black stripes. I don't have an X-acto knife but I realized today that it's going to be my next decorating investment. The lovely gold sheen was achieved with lemon extract and "old gold" luster dust (usually I use vodka, but we didn't have any of that and it's Sunday, plus I doubt my parents were going to buy me vodka anyway, even if it was only to paint a cake). I free-handed the horse and the writing, which turned out quite spiffy, if I do say so myself. (I can never draw horses, but it turns out I can paint a tiny silhouette of one!)

Oh, and Adam helped me put the ribbon around the cake. If you look at the back side of it, you can see his little thumb prints. Which is why it's on the back.

It's not exactly the neatest cake in the world, but I'm hoping that everyone else doesn't notice all my flaws, so I'll try not to point them all out. I'll keep my perfectionist comments to myself!

Happy Father's Day!

Father's Days from the Past

Father's Day is coming up, so I've reached back into my photo album to pull out these cake pictures from bygone years. This lovely star-shaped cake was probably from 2007 or so, and believe it or not, I actually whipped this one out pretty quickly. I don't really remember why, but I do remember thinking "Oh, a Father's Day cake? I need to make one of those... right now?!" Is it the most elaborate Father's Day cake ever? No. But was it sweet and well-received and delicious? Yes. And it was chocolate, so that's all my dad needs in a Father's Day cake. :)

I honestly have no idea what the date is on this cake, I just know I made it a really long time ago when my dad first started playing golf. I found this cake in a magazine (as I often did in my early decorating days, before I discovered Cake Central or even Wilton), and my grandma helped me put it together. There's coconut for the rough, brown sugar for the sand traps, blue piping gel for the water hazard, weird chewy mint leaves with pretzels for the tree, and tic tacs for the golf balls. How clever is that? And to think, I wasn't even serious about cake decorating back then. Oh, I've come a long way.

Now you're just going to have to check back in a few days to see my next chocolately masterpiece. I haven't exactly made it yet. You can't exactly blame me for waiting until the last minute, see, because my dad's a procrastinator too. And since he did give me half of my DNA, it's really his fault that I have such trouble with time management. So I can totally blame it on him...right? ;)