I have always been impressed when I have seen cakes with 'things' apparently bursting out of the top of them and I thought I would share with you how I put one together recently.
I decided that I would airbrush the cake afterwards, rather than colour the fondant beforehand. I'm not sure that was such a great idea now, but I was happy with the end result so it all turned out OK in the end.
So first of all I rolled out some fondant and used the tin I baked the cake in as a 'cutter' to make a circle the right size to go on the top of the cake.
I then cut out a circle of greaseproof paper, using a smaller tin as a guide, and popped that on top of the fondant circle, before covering the cake properly.
I then lightly placed the smaller tin on the top of the cake which left a slight indentation that I could use as a guide to cut slits into the fondant. Be careful when doing this. The greaseproof paper acts as a guard to stop you from cutting through the second layer, but if you put too much pressure on the knife/cutter then it will pierce the paper and the layer underneath. Once I'd cut the slits, I peeled back the pieces and gently curled them into a nice shape.
I then was able to remove the greaseproof paper to reveal the perfect layer of fondant underneath to protect the cake. I had thought that I would be able to simply 'pinch' the paper to pull it out, but it proved more difficult than I anticipated. In the end I used the point of a knife to gently hook it out, strategically choosing a place where I knew the topper would be inserted so that any blemish wouldn't be visible.
I then set about airbrushing the cake. As the fondant still had a little flexibility at this stage, I was able to place a sheet of paper towel under each of the pulled back pieces to protect the main body of the cake while I airbrished it in red. I then did the rest of the cake blue and managed reasonably sucessfully not to get blue contaminating the red parts. Obviously it would be easier to do this with pre-coloured fondant, but I don't seem to like doing things the easy way :o)
I think the end result is quite effective, and it certainly adds an extra dimension to a cake.
This is just the way I worked out how to do this - if you have other tried and tested methods, I would love to hear about them!
