Gone Fishing

My sister-in-law's step father asked if I would do his retirement cake. He said he wanted it to look like the party invitation. When I got the picture, I almost said no, but then I decided I would take the challenge.

Even though he was "retiring," he had a boat and he decided to spend all of his time taking clients out fishing. Sounds pretty rough for someone who absolutely loves fishing. It's funny that people retire and then manage to simply find a different job.

I took the picture, inverted it, and blew it up to 11 x 17 size. That way, I could do a buttercream transfer of the entire top of the cake. It would be far easier than trying to do it freestyle. I had also been wanting to try doing an entire cake's surface as a transfer since I figured it would provide additional stability to the image. If you try to do an image with a lot of detail without surrounding support for it, the details are likely to break off when you try to remove if from the plastic. I figured that one giant sheet of frozen icing would be pretty solid and easy to manipulate.

I had a pretty large bamboo cutting board that I taped the image to the back of. I carefully covered it with plastic wrap so there were no wrinkles at all. I then set about mixing the many colors I needed one by one and slowly built the image up from light to dark. Once I had the main image complete and all of the background details, I filled in the background water and sky. I then stuck the whole image in the freezer for a couple of hours. I was working on the previous Mario cake just before finishing this one, so it was another really busy day.

I took the image out of the freezer after it seemed to set up and readied to put it on the cake. The cake was covered with white buttercream and I tried to make sure it was still wet when I flipped the image from the cutting board over on the cake. This is a tense moment, because the image warms quickly after you take it out of the freezer and if it warms too much, there is absolutely no chance you will get a second attempt before it softens. You have to work quickly.

I managed to get the image almost perfectly centered on the cake and shaved off a little bit of the image that hung over the sides. I then piped around the top to cover the edges and the small gap between the icing image layer and the icing below it. I was piping the border just before walking out of the house. It was also a very humid rainy day, so the icing took a while to set up. Travelling without letting the icing crust completely is a dangerous proposition. I pushed it a little too much and the top border icing did shift a little bit. Nobody commented on it and I may have been the only person who really cared, but it bothered me. I actually like this type of image better than some airbrushed or printed image. It seems much more impressive when it's all made from icing, especially when it is a detailed image like this one.