Monday 29 April 2013

The sliceable circus

This is a bit of a ridiculous project - I had the idea ticking away in my head for ages but wasn't sure how to do it. I've always liked cakes with patterns inside - I do a lot of marbling, and have been following Ivan Day's history of the Battenberg cake with interest - so the idea of being able to slice open a cake and get a picture was pretty enticing.

As usual I overcomplicated and decided to do three different animals.

I coloured and baked the batter first, then cut it into the right shapes, spreading melted chocolate round the edges to hold them together, and putting bits of coloured icing in for eyes.

Then I put a layer of green batter with bits of biscuit in it to look like hay, lined up the animals in the tin, and poured the purple batter over to be the background. Unfortunately the animals were really fragile and bits kept dropping off, and had to be stuck on with lots of chocolate.

I iced the outside to look like a circus wagon, which of course involved maximum sweets and glitter - I thought there was no point being understated since its such a ridiculous concept. Sadly glitter never photographs well.



And it sort of worked! Maybe its the circus's hospital wagon, because there are repairs in evidence on all the animals - but I still think you can pretty much tell what they are.











Sunday 21 April 2013

This cake was for one of the founders of the Poems Underwater project, which is building up an amazing range of mermaid-focused history, interviews writing and art. I've always wanted to do a mermaid cake, and have had a soft spot for them ever since I persuaded my parents to get a salt dough mermaid plaque from Camden Lock Market on an ill-fated childhood outing.

There's a kind of purity about medieval mermaid illuminations, matter of factly placed among a menagerie of animals in bestiaries, between the mandrake, manticore and mole, rather than being humanised or sentimentalised. The line drawings are a bit bald and bare to work from, though, I wanted to do something a bit less awkward, and more satisfying so I was loosely inspired by a very late medieval (1430-50) detail from a misericord in Ludlow, Shropshire. I ended up sanitising and cartoonising the original, half by accident - I put the waist ruffle too high up, losing the typical medieval rounded stomach, and imagined in the left arm with a comb, as a counterpart to the right arm with its mirror.

She is completely sculpted out of cake - and looked like this underneath....
And then a draped sheet of rolled out fondant, over a thin layer of buttercream, smoothed the sharp edges into something more workable - I pressed out the scales using the angled lid of a felt tip pen.

Painting it with food colouring was definitely the easy bit, but I wasn't happy with the face - this method isn't delicate enough to do sharp modelling, so it came out very flat - another time, I'd be tempted to make a solid icing 'mask'.

A couple more pictures, to try and show the depth...



Sunday 14 April 2013

Brocade dress

This one started with a vintage dress pattern I got from an old woman Haynes Lane Collector's Market - a great place to go if you like sifting through dusty and precarious piles of old toys, records and haberdashery. It looks very classically 60s, but I have a feeling it might be later because it was with another pattern in the same size and a similar style that was dated 1972- the 60s had a bit of a long acid comedown fashion-wise.

I'd had some brocade fabric I was keen to get used up - it was a bargain bin thing I'd bought ages ago. Laying out the pattern pieces it quickly became apparent I didn't have enough fabric, so I had to improvise and use another tiny remnant for the yoke. Together, the colours looked a bit suburban sofaish, so they fell victim to my dyeing obsession.


Even with the extra fabric, I had to be a bit devious to squeak the pattern pieces out of only 1x1.5 metres, cutting into seam allowances and changing the shape a bit - there were only the tiniest of scraps left at the end, and there was no way I could match up the pattern along the seams. As though things weren't complicated enough, as I was sewing I noticed a horrible bleached bit down the middle.

It looked worse in real life, and I despaired for a bit and put the project away - but after a while I reconciled myself to it and carefully painted the colour back in with more fabric dye.I didn't mind the finished dress, but it needed something, so I braved embroidery for the first time in a long while, working with two strands of copper metallic thread that tangled constantly to do the outlines, then filling them in with the real stuff. I did it mostly on the bus, enabling me to experience all the possible variations of "My Grandma used to embroider/sew/crochet/do things with string" type conversations in terms of ages, technical knowledge and creepiness levels. 




I'm really pleased with how my first attempt at an invisible zip at the back came out, so will try and get a pic of that too at some point.

Sunday 7 April 2013

Fairies

There were two slightly sad looking fairy/eighteenth century style pantomine dresses lurking in Antoinette's. The bodices were mostly plain, but someone had haphazardly brushed them with paint V shapes and what looked like hot glue stains. My design had to incorporate the existing stains and colours, so I turned the lines into angled stems and leaves in acrylic paint, with some metallic details - trying my best to bring the bodice together with the much lighter colour of the skirt and sleeves.

I have a theory that these might have been for a 1950s production of A Midsummer's Night dream. If so, this is Mustard Seed....




Peaseblossom was similar, in pink - but minutes after I'd sewed the last bead on, an A-level photography student came in to hire her for a photoshoot. Hopefully she'll make good on her promise to send the pictures.

Decemberists Castaways and Cutouts cake



 My last cake for Liam was the cover of Mastodon's Leviathan - so much fun to do, wish I had pictures. This is another watery album art-based one, but not quite as good because it doesn't have a giant whaley shipwreck, although having the ghosts is something.


The icing round the edge is meant to be like waves, and the sponge inside is marbled blue - as were my hands/kitchen by the end. This is legitimately the best action shot I've ever taken.