First, I made 4 batches (Good Gosh!) of my favorite Red Velvet Cake recipe from the Hummingbird Bakery in London. While this cake is delicious, the recipe is in metric measurements (a.k.a. grams and ounces), so in order to make the recipe, I had to first weigh everything - a big pain in the patoot. And I had to do it in 4 separate batches because I had tried doubling the recipe once before and it didn't turn out like it should. So, I would mix a batch, then put it in the pan; mix another batch and put in in the pan with the previous batch. It took 2 batches to make one layer of cake in my 13x9 pan, so it took 4 to have a 2 layer cake, follow me? Anyway, lots of work with mixing, yaddah yaddah. I used my favorite recipe for cream cheese frosting from my friend Angela instead of the one from the Hummingbird Bakery recipe, which is incredibly fickle - besides, Angela's icing is seriously delicious. I wanted to sit with the bowl and a spoon and just eat it all.
So, I layered the cake and put cream cheese frosting in the middle. Then, I cut out the pieces to reveal the neck of the cake. My cake's top needed to be taller, so I pieced an extra bit of cake and attached it with some toothpicks. Here was my cake after it was carved.
Next, I had to paint my cake, which was the recommendation of my cake making friend Leigh. She had made this same cake before, plus had lots of experience with fondant, and she said I should just paint it or my colors would not be right. So, paint it I did. I used food coloring gel mixed with vodka - also a tip from Leigh. She said that water leaves the fondant sticky when it dries, but the vodka just evaporates, leaving it dry. She was very right.
After I got the cake completely painted, I mixed some black food coloring into some more fondant to at least give it a body color other than white - I didn't want the white to show at all. It took lots of coloring and it still was only a purple color and it was very dry and brittle, so I wouldn't recommend it. I rolled out another piece of fondant and cut out two pieces in the sizes I needed. I put a little bit of icing on the cake where I wanted the black fondant to go so it would stick, and I smoothed it out. Next, I had to paint it black. Man was that a challenge. You have no idea how much food coloring it takes to really achieve black black until you try it yourself. And mine was actually a greenish black unless I coated it on thick. I ended up mixing it with the vodka and vanilla and letting it evaporate a bit into more of a thick goo. This made it so much easier to get it to stick to the sides and it made a nice, even coat. This was the most challenging part of my cake.
After my painting was finished, all that remained was to write on it. I printed out a picture of the real deal so I could try to copy it and did some practice runs on my plates. I've never been very confident in my writing on cakes, so I really didn't want to mess it up. So now, the jig is up, I was making a Jack Daniel's cake :)
