A Baby Cake and STRINGWORK

Ah yes. The string work. We’ll get to that in a minute. We learned a LOT about patience and keeping your cool this week ;) But our second project with Chef Mark, the Baby Shower cake, turned out really cute. And we’re going to pretend that I made this for my friend Elizabeth who is due to have a little boy in February!! ;)

This is what we were going for:
That my friends, is bridgeless extensions string work. Oh. My. Heck. Lucky for us, we didn’t actually have to go allll the way around our cakes with this stuff. We just did a section. Although I think I could have used all that practice ;)

We started off by covering a round cake dummy in a pale yellow fondant. (i’m starting to get somewhat good at that, by the way…YAY!) And inlaid an embossed plaque (basically a large polka dot…like on the MAN cake, remember?)
Hm. I guess I didn’t start taking pictures until later…the shell border and ribbons around the side didn’t come until a day or two after…anyhow…
We made little teddy bears
We made super small ones too which are ADORABLE…confirming John’s theory that for a girl, the smaller the item is, the cuter it gets. C’mon. You know it’s true. We even put the tiny bears on our cake board
I know. So cute. It gets better. 

We learned how to strain royal icing so make sure it’s in top condition. We were using SUPER small tips for the string work so we couldn’t have any grains of powdered sugar clogging up the tips. That would be BAD. This was fun though, you put a nylon (yes, a stocking) over your hand and scoop the icing into your hand

And you basically squeeze it out the toe :) very messy, and it looked way cool
Sweet, huh?

Once the icing was finely strained, we could use it to do our bridges and strings. To help you with that terminology, the bridge is the loop/curve/smiley shaped line at the bottom. The strings go from the cake to the bridge. Here are the bridges (also very hard to pipe. They like to fall off…)
  Once those were dry, we worked on the strings. Oh, the strings. Love hate relationship, I’m tellin’ ya. It could be quite relaxing when you were successful. The steadiness on just pumping out string on the cake. Not so much if you couldn’t get the FREAKING TOP TO STAY ON. *ahem* That part wasn’t so nice. But after an hour or so, I got these all on

But this did not go down without difficulty. I kept having blow outs in my piping bag!! (when the icing explodes out of the bag…) But I didn’t have time to take it all out and refold another parchment bag and restrain my icing! So my bag looked like this
*Ahem* Covered in masking tape is NOT normal…moving on… ;) 
Aren’t you just AMAZED?! I know I was!!! ;) Chef Mark told us when he’s asked to do this on a cake…he charges $25 an INCH. I know. Good money for string work.
Oh. But we aren’t done yet. This, to me, is like the acrobatics of string work. We added hail spots, scallops, and my archenemy lace points. How did I do this you ask? Very, very carefully.
Those two sad looking broken shapes on the top there? Lace points. We piped them earlier and they were so thin and fragile that if I didn’t break them getting off the wax paper, I broke them trying to get them on the cake without breaking my strings. I was not entirely successful. Blech. 
Oh yeah, here’s the progress on the top of the cake :) SO CUTE, right? I love my little bear

So, meanwhile, we had a little mini square cake (which we all thought was SO CUTE – it’s little, remember? ha ha) that we practiced some other techniques on. Like oriental strings, which entails flipping the cake upside down to get the desired effect. (and I don’t know if I’d be brave enough to try this on a real cake. seriously. acrobatics.)

So you turn it upside down, pipe it on, let it dry, flip it over, and ta da!! Crazy. I know.
Okay, back to the big cake. I miraculously managed to fix the broken strings in the middle from sticking on the lace points. Then Chef told us we needed at least 4 on there. Oh man. But I managed that as well. Then came a teddy bear and some piping   And it was all done! Kind of. Then one of the strings on the faaaarrrr right broke off (see? up there? on the right?) and I felt pretty pro at fixing at this point, so I tried to break off the remnants…and broke half the bridge. So sad. But with my mad skillz I FIXED IT! 

Then came the EVALUATION. Yeah, less than a week on piping strings and we’re tested on it. Whew!! Thankfully, my piping bags did NOT explode on me and went fairly smoothly. Except for the lace points. Oh how I loathe the lace points. We had to have THREE on our evaluation strings! blech. and we had pipe new ones for it. Not that any of my other ones survived. I broke them all. So i finished my strings, piped some lace points and then set them to dry. I had 6 or 7. Well, I broke them ALL. Back to piping. I piped 13 more. Still barely ended up with 3 to stick on my cake (we’re talking 2 okay ones and a broken one). And I managed to repair one ON the cake. Oh yeah, I’m getting good at this!!
And I just realized I don’t have a picture with the lace points on. Just imagine them. ;) But I got good marks over all!! YAY!

And that is the baby shower cake my friends. Now I have to spend the weekend working out the knot in my shoulder from all that piping! ;)

Hope you all have a lovely weekend!