First swim party

There is a good story behind this one. We were at the place where my son takes swim lessons one day and idly talking to the manager. Nobody else was there, so we sat and talked for a long time. She's real nice and chatty, so we get along well. She was talking about the parties they do there and talked about all of the woes they've had with the cakes. They had to drive a great distance to get cakes for the party to get them from one bakery where their other branch orders from. They asked if we knew anyone who did cakes. My wife just pointed at me. We started talking and I agreed to make them a couple of samples so they could try my more common and typical recipes. I brough those over then next week and they were a hit. However, the owner was still not convinced. He wanted to save a bit more money and possibly use one of the local grocery store bakeries to make the cake. The manager pressured him into using me so that their clients would get a much better product and it would be more customized. The owner relented and I started filling orders for them. Since this is a swimming party, I wanted to go with that theme for their cakes. The first one I made for them happened to be a pool. I took some risks on this one though. I wanted to get the water effect, so I tried making piping gel for the first time to get the clear water effect. It worked beautifully, but was nerve wracking. Since I worked on the cake late into Friday night and again Saturday morning, there was no chance of fixing anthing if things went catastrophically wrong. The gel was m biggest worry. Never having used it before, I was concerned that it would either break down on me and ruin the rest of the cake or leak around the sides and do the same. I tried to mitigate that as much as possible with the design, but I still didn't know for sure. Piping gel has to be cooked. Therefore, it has to be cooled before putting it on the cake. Since I was using a lot, I made the gel on Friday night to use on Saturday. When I went to bed, it was still warm and didn't look quite thick enough to me, but it turned out fine in the morning.

   

If memory serves, the cake was white and I used white buttercream over it. The edges of the pool are fondant. The letters on the bottom of the pool were made from fondant as well and are formed from lots of individual blue "tiles". The morning I had to deliver, I put the letters down then poured the piping gel over the letters. Since put put the tight fitting fondant tiles on the edge of the pool. The served as a barrier for the gel and kept it in place. After pouring the gel, I then made little lane marker floats out of fondant and set them gently in the gel. I then connected the floats with lines of thin buttercream icing. The end result looked cool. It really had the effect of looking through water at the bottom of the pool. It isn't the easiest thing to make out in the pictures, but the one below shows a little bit of the glare from the gel when taken at an angle. It looked much cooler in person.

   

I had leftover fondant after doing the pool sides, so I made the waves to go around the sides of the cake. It just added a little more interest. It was really well received, so my cake making days for FINS had started.