This weekend was an amazing one. As a birthday surprise for one of my best friends, another friend and I bought her plane tickets to visit us for a girls weekend. What do you need to complete a birthday/girls weekend/wine drinking bash!? Cake of course!
In following suit with the birthday theme, my vision for this cake was to make it look similar to a wrapped present. I initially wanted to do a porcelain blue icing with white ribbon but I figured that looked too much like a Tiffany box and we certainly weren't proposing to the girl. My next idea was a light green but of course my green dye had dried up; so purple it was! I used Funfetti cake again and cream cheese frosting. This cake took a several days to assemble since I had to start creating the bow a few days in advance. I followed similar steps to my last post about making these bows and even listened to my own advice to make the fondant strips thinner. I used Wilton white fondant and rolled it out after folding Crisco into it and sprinkling the mat with corn starch.
I cut 1" strips from the rolled fondant, folded them into loops, placed them on foil, and let them air dry overnight before moving on to the next step of assembling the bow. For more details on this process, please see 'Practice Makes Perfect'.
To create the bow, alternating the direction each loop is laying can give it a more realistic look. I used vanilla frosting as glue, which made it much easier this time to hide since it blended in so well. Once the bow was assembled, I put it in the freezer to harden.
The next step was the cake. I baked the cake layers two days in advance to make the assembling process much quicker. Contrary to what you would think, you can actually store a cake for up to a week depending on how you wrap it and how long you leave it uncut. After baking the layers and letting them cool for about two hours, I placed them in air tight gallon bags for the night.
Once it finally came time to put together this masterpiece, the first step was to make the cake layers the right shape. Whenever I bake cakes, I can never figure out why the top comes out so rounded so I usually end up shaving off the top layer to make it flat. I think my husband may now be a big fan of this step as he is the one who gets to taste test the leftover cake.
Next, I worked to make the cream cheese icing the perfect shade of purple. I didn't want an obnoxious shade of Grape Kool-Aid so I had to slowly add in the coloring to create a lavender look. It took much longer than I thought adding food coloring should, but I was very pleased with the end result. Once this was done, I pieced together my two layers of cake and attempted to ice the outside. This was actually very difficult because cream cheese icing is so soft and the cake kept "crumbing" on me, meaning that each time I applied icing, more of the cake would mix in with it. On top of that, it was near impossible to make this icing look smooth. For the future, I will stick to buttercream. Let's be honest, butter and cream can never be a mistake.
As this was the most frustrating part up to this point, I was ready to move on and put the ribbon on the cake. I made two long strips of fondant and crossed them across the cake, trimming the ends as close to the plate as possible and tucking them under the bottom layer. Finally, the beautiful bow!
The cake tasted delicious and I was surprised at how moist it was after several days. The best part (and the whole point of the journey): Patty loved it! The downside: now that the weekend is over, I am left with half of it still sitting in my kitchen and a goal to not eat it by myself. Volunteers to help with this problem are welcome! Until next time, Happy Sunday Funday!
