"Monster" Guitar

This cake was for one of our neighbors who is a friend of my son's. She's a sweet girl and currently living with her father. Her mother is actually my neighbor, if you can follow that logic. Anyway, the mother sent me a text and asked if I would do a cake for her daughter. I was a little confused because she had asked me for a cake a couple of weeks ago and ended up cancelling, but I knew that she had a birthday party for her daughter. Well, she explained that the girl's father didn't have a party for her, in fact, he didn't get her a gift, a cake, or anything. I thought that was terribly sad, especially since I like the girl. All her mother asked me for was a cake in the shape of a guitar. No other directions or requests were given, so I started planning.

I knew that the girl's room was decorated in pink, black and white. I also knew from the many hours she has spent over at our house that she loves Monster High dolls. The fact is, so does my wife, and my wife has quite a few. I made a cake that would completely cover the cake board I had, and started carving. I didn't want the classic electric guitar look, so I opted for the more angular design. I had so much cake left, that I wanted to do something else with it. That's where the Monster High came in. I decided to duplicate the skull from the logo, and since it went with the pink, black, and white motif, it was perfect!

The cake is white, with white butter cream as a crumb coat and sticky layer. It is covered with the marshmallow fondant. The first layer of black that I put on the guitar was extremely dry and cracked a lot. I happened to have a lot of black left over from the Saints cake, so I simply covered it with another layer of black. For some reason, the liquid black coloring makes the fondant get all grainy. I need to stop using it, but it sure does get things black fast. What I did was nuke the ball o' black in the microwave until it was pretty much liquid. Then I let it cool just long enough to handle and rolled it out quickly and set it on the cake. This time it came out fairly smooth and I had only one or two slight blemishes on some of the sharper angles. The white fondant went on the skull easily. I mixed up the pink and cut out the stripes and bow to apply to the two cake parts. The rest of the detail is all butter cream icing. Now, when you draw lines on a white cake with a colored icing, slight irregularities don't show up too much unless the color it really dark. When you put a light color on a dark cake, you can see every little irregularity there is. I piped on the guitar strings, then added in the white lines for the neck and pickups. I had some icing left, so I put the little pearl necklace looking border on the skull and mixed some black up for the bow. The skull eyes were fondant as well. As soon as I finished the cake, I took a picture with my phone and sent it to the mom. I got an immediate reply of, "That is AWESOME!!!" She said it took a moment for it to register that I added the Monster High skull on there and it wasn't an amp or something like that.

The mom brought the cake to her daughter at her father's house (is this getting confusing?). The girl absolutely loved it and immediately laid claim to the skull portion. The report was that she wouldn't take her eyes off of the cake, even when her Mom was leaving and she had to say goodbye. That was exactly the type of reaction I was looking for with the design I came up with since it was based on everything I knew the girl liked.