Saturday 14 July 2012

1,2 Freddy's Coming For You...


Its been a few weeks since my last post and in that time my son has turned 8 and Ive had a wonderful couple of weeks on the beaches of Phuket in Thailand.

This post is about the cake I created for my Son's 8th Birthday - a Freddy Krueger Inspired affair.  Before anybody thinks I am an irresponsible parent - my son has never seen the film, but he is obsessed wtih all things gruesome and Halloween oriented so his choice of cake came as no surprise to me.

I wanted to create the famous hand with the knives on the fingers but that was hardly going to be enough to feed 10 children plus adults.  I came up with the idea to create the hand entirely from fondant and mount it on top of a loaf shaped cake like a stand.  I then created cupcakes with fondant toppers depicting the words from the wonderful theme song.  All inspired thru my searches on the wonderful Mr Google.  I used some cool techniques on this little project which I will talk u thru.  It is also the first time I have used my airbrush that Santa brought me - what a cool new tool that is !

Ok here goes...

This took a little bit of panning and preparation.  Instead of covering a cakeboard, I used a matt black core board that I purchased at Spotlight for about $6.  This was only suitable as the weight of the entire cake etc wasn't going to be too heavy.    I managed to locate some of the funky candles Ive been admiring on other people's cake creations also.  Matt Black cupcake wrappers completed the non-cakey items.

First up - my son isn't a big chocolate fan so the cakes are plain vanilla buttercake all gluten free.  I started work on the hand first.  I coloured some fondant a light brown colour and used my own hand as a modelling guide.  I knew I needed to make the cake and then have the fondant harden before mounting the hand.  I also knew I needed to have the hand curved slightly not straight so I dried the hand over the top of some scrunched up baking paper to allow it to hold its slightly curved shape.

While the hand was drying out I coloured some fondant a light grey colour and measured and cut out the knives for the four fingers.  Next step was to fire up the airbrush.  I used a dark brown in the airbrush to spray the hand and add texture.  It looked fantastic.  Then I added my silver food grade liquid and sprayed the knives.  Once these had dried, I modeled the silver plates for the glove on the hand, attached them and sprayed them silver also.  I created the rivets using the end of biro pen.  Perfect!  Now the conundrum - how to best attach the knives to the fingers without the weight of the knives either a) snapping the knife or b) snapping the finger from the hand...  I needed to get the hand off the board and into the air!  I made a Vanilla Cake in a loaf tin and covered with black fondant to make a type of plinth and centered it on the board.  It would support the length of the hand and fingers.

Using the loaf cake as a stand worked brilliantly.  I carved the cake a little on the top to support the slight curve in the hand and the and rested perfectly on it.  A couple of the fingers required the support of a toothpick thru them from underneath inserted in the cake just to prevent them cracking off.
The knives were then inserted into the middle of the fingers and held in place using tinted royal icing to really cement them in place.  I supported them on toothpicks until hard then removed the supports.

It was then time to really have some fun with the airbrush - getting the blood effect on the knives worked really well and I used a silver lustre powder to bring out the metallic pieces on the hand.

The cupcakes were just a basic GF Vanilla Cupcake topped with a vanilla buttercream icing using the technique in the icing bag of painting stripes of red colour inside the bag so that when piped it would create a red edging - very effective for my ghoulish cakes - then each was topped with its own fondant topper.  I managed to find a way to write on the black fondant with a tip from another decorator - I used my silver edible paint and a very fine paintbrush and handwrote the words - worked brilliantly!

Everything was then mounted onto the matt black core board - the candles were held in place with black royal icing and the cupcakes positioned around the hand.  The kids absolutely loved fighting over who was going to eat the knives and the fingers !!!

All in all a wonderful party and another cake success.

Lx

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