Contest Winning Cake (on the 2nd try:)

      I'm pretty happy that one of my cakes won the Halloween cake contest on the Cakes We Bake website. There were a lot of really awesome cakes like Zombie Dog by Paul Joachim and the very creepy Spoils the Clown cake by Tami Chitwood. I won with my "Ghost" cake that I had actually done for the Threadcakes competition this summer and failed to place with any of my 13 (yes I went a little nuts) entries. I still have all the step-by step pictures from that cake, so since I'm in a great mood from the validation of winning something I decided to post about it. UPDATE: I found out today(11/15) that this cake also one 2nd place in the Cake Central Halloween cake Contest!!!

This is the kick-ass t-shirt I based my cake on by Droopy, DRP, if it's still in stock you can buy it here (I did). I started off with a half sheet of chocolate cake flavored with a little bourbon. I had printed out a larger version of the t-shirt, and made a rough waxed paper template and cut out the basic shape

I then cut out other elements out of the original template and used them as templates for the elements I wanted to stand out

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In this photo you can see I've started to build-up the face area as well. After the basics were carved and placed I mixed together cake and frosting to make a clay-ish texture (like cake-pops) that I used to form the hair and other fine elements that would be hard to carve

When I had most of the details I covered it with a chocolate syrup-based frosting.

Next up: covering the whole thing in  a layer of fondant:

After that was trimmed I started painting with gel colors thinned with vodka.

As I worked, I was adding in different elements and layers of fondant, in the next picture I had made the 2nd hand of fondant, as well as the teeth on the first wrist

I just kept adding layers and painting as I went

At this point I thought that the board needed to be black- I was hoping I could just paint it, but the surface was too slick. I took all my scraps of colored fondant and gumpaste and mixed them together- ending with a purple shade. I laid it around the cake and painted it w/ black airbrush food color.

And the finished product:

This one was a lot of fun to do. Painting on fondant is probably my favorite technique. Hope you enjoyed seeing it come together.