High Top Shoe Cake

For some odd reason, doing a shoe cake was on my list of things that I wanted to try. It just so happens that one of our new neighbors was talking to another one of our neighbors who I have made a whole lot of cakes for and was referred to me for her daughter's birthday cake. She gave me an invitation which looked like a pink high top shoe. I liked it immediately. Looking at the invite, I knew I could make it into a full stand-up shoe cake.

 

I believe the cake was white for this one, though my memory on the flavor is a little rusty since I've waited way too long to write about some of these. It stood four layers tall, which I then carved into the shoe shape I needed. It wasn't the most stable thing in the world since it was pretty narrow from side to side until I had it covered with marshmallow fondant. I covered the cake first with buttercream and also had buttercream between the layers.

 

The grommets for the shoe laces and the shoe laces themselves were also marshmallow fondant that I cut out. I then carefully placed and tucked the shoe lace pieces to make it look like it was actually laced through. The tongue and white highlights were made from various layers of fondant. The girl's name is on the tongue.

   

The stitching was kind of tricky. I used a really small tip to get the stitches as small as possible. It took a while, but it needed the detail to complete the effect. The logo on the side became the girl's age, which I thought was a nice touch. It was on both sides.

   

I delivered the cake and the father was thrilled with it. As we sat and talked, his young son came up and hit the side of the cake. My heart stopped. Luckily, he only messed up some of the small dots around the logo, so we simply turned the cake around to the other side. I found out much later that the mom, who was the one who ordered the cake, expected just a shoe shaped cake that would be a one layer-type cake laying on a cake board. She didn't expect me to go all Da Vinci on it and make it look like a real shoe. She loved it though and the surprise made it that much better.