Red Hat Cake

About a month ago, my husband and I ventured into cake decorating. Our first official cake for someone else was a graduation cake you can find here.

From that first cake we got another request for a couple of weeks later. From a couple of inspiration pictures the "clients" (They were really just good friends, not really clients, but it sounds professional!) provided I sketched a design and off we went. I was much more hands on with this project than the previous one. 

Here is one inspirational pic. Here is the other one.

To start we made strips for the large bow they wanted. Originally we had purple and red fondant for the bows. We also made hats by cutting circles and pushing them into mini muffin tins to create the top of the hats. 

Next we made the cake. We used the same zebra style cake. You can find the recipe here. This time we used red and white. We wanted to try red and purple, but were too afraid that the colors would bleed together and it would be a brownish yuck color. We had to cut one of the cakes in half and found this heart in the center. How cool is that!?

We had to use trial and error with the bow. The red and purple strips were too long and would not stand up. We also tried using candy melts as an anchor for the strips. Not good. It did not work and the purple strips broke and it just looked terrible. We ended up doing a solid red bow and using royal icing to attach all the strips. The tissue you see in the pictures helps the fondant dry in the right form. 

On the hats we made feathers, roses, flowers, and bows. 

We added some frills to the sides. Then we painted them with pearl dust for a little shine. Yes, that was a pain, but it was worth it. It gave a very subtle sheen on the flourishes.

It looks pretty plain, huh? Not for long.

We added pearls intertwined in the bow... one at a time... by hand... with tweezers... and royal icing for glue. Picture this: Round little pearl candies being forced into small tweezers and pushed into a small space. About every other one would fly out of the tweezers and land all over the table. We were chasing little candies around and trying to avoid messing up the cake at the same time. It took a very long time and tons of patience.

Then we added the pearls to the rest of the cake. This is the front view of the bow and pearls.

And the back view of bow and pearls.

Then we added the hats.

It was a great party and fun to celebrate our good friend's birthday. It was even more special to see the look on her face when we delivered that cake. Good times! Hopefully we will be able to do more cakes at some point. I think I'm hooked!!!