My first cake surgery

You know how I've said that every cake is an adventure? Well, this cake definitely was one of my most adventurous ones yet. It all started with a message from Amanda asking me to make an extravagant cake for her son's extravagant birthday party on Saturday March 24th. I looked at the calendar and noticed that the 24th was a thursday so I assumed she meant the 26th. (I know, I know, you shouldn't assume anything... I know what it does). I was super excited. It's not too often I get to make an extravagant cake with bright colors and fun shapes. Most of the extravagant type cakes I make are for weddings (which I love) but they're usually white. With ribbon. And a few other decorations. Not like a kid's birthday cake at all!

On Monday, February 28th, I posted a picture of my latest cake. The cancucks birthday cake for Avery. Imagine my shock and surprise when up comes a comment from Amanda that says "I can't wait to see Blake's cake this weekend". THIS WEEKEND?! I thought I had 3 weeks to plan and prepare for this extravagant cake! My stomach knotted up. I stood in shock with the thought "what do I do now?" So, I sent Amanda a message "Please call me. Tonight if possible. Thanks!" Thankfully, my phone rang shortly after I hit send and we confirmed the party date...Saturday, March 5th... we also confirmed flavors and size so I at least knew where to start. In the original message, Amanda had mentioned that Blake wanted a cake boss cake. Well, I'm not even close to being the cake boss yet, but I went to his site for inspiration. You might find that Blake's cake looks a bit like one that was made for a kid named Marco. 

Now that I had a plan, it was time to get something started. So I went to bed. What good can I do if I'm overtired? I had a good enough sleep to be functional on Tuesday and so that afternoon I made some wilton rolled fondant. It's the fondant I use when I need the decorations to dry. It calls for glucose, glycerin, gelatin and a few other things that not everyone keeps in their cupboard. Once that was made, I split it into 7 different lumps and added the colors I needed... a couple hours later I had 4 cookie sheets covered in letters, stars and curliques. To make a long story short, by friday evening this is what was made:

Notice the lean? Yeah, so did we. I couldn't decide what to do about the lean. I've had cakes lean before and they were fine. But this one made me nervous. Once again, I knew something had to be done.  I had put 22 hours into this cake and it was leaning. It made me tired just thinking about what I was going to do. I had never performed cake surgery before and I really didn't feel that Friday evening was the right time to perform my first one. I didn't feel Friday evening was the right time to even decide if I was gonna leave it and hope the cake stayed standing in the van on the drive to the party or if cake surgery was needed. So I went to bed. Yep, when there's a big decision to be made, I go to sleep. 

In the next few pictures, you'll see that in the morning, with a clear head, I made the decision that cake surgery was necessary to give me peace of mind when it came to transporting the cake. We (my wonderful husband and I) very carefully took the cake apart. You can see in the photos that I hadn't spread the dowels out enough. Lesson learned.

See that little pie shaped piece of cakeboard? I had cut that the night before, tilted the cake a bit with my hand and shoved a few of those in each tier to try and fix the lean. Sometimes this works... this time it didn't.

Here it is... restacked and ready to be made pretty again.

Check out how much space there is! We added new dowels in the bottom and second tiers of the cake  and made sure they were the same height as the ones that were in the middle of the cake. This picture shows just how much this cake got squished on the back side.

The finished cake! It's done! It's ready to go! I left it on the cookie sheet so it would be easier to transport.

Blake likes Star Wars so I added a couple light sabres to the cake :)

On Friday afternoon my good friend Megan came over to help out with the cake so I put her to work making some Lego blocks out of fondant. Aren't they cute?! She did an awesome job. I had a few piles of them on the cake just to add another personal element to it for Blake.

Well, that's it. I LOVED making Blake's cake. It was stressful at times, but a lot of fun too. A great big Thank you goes out to Amanda for asking me to make the cake, to my Husband for all his help and patience while I stressed out, my girls for somewhat understanding why they couldn't help with this cake and to Megan for making the Lego and washing my dishes. You were right Megan, I'm gonna invite you over all the time now ;)

Can't wait for the next cake adventure!

~Rachel

Oh yeah! I wanted to mention that the top tier is a marble cake with orea buttercream, the next one is vanilla cake with mocha buttercream, then there's a vanilla cake with chocolate buttercream and finally, the bottom tier is a chocolate cake with oreo buttercream. SO YUMMY! And each tier is covered with marshmallow fondant.

The Cake Boss cake that I got my inspiration from: