Cake Central Winter Wedding Cake

     A few months ago I was asked to submit a Christmas Wedding Cake to Cake Central Magazine , and was sent this pretty inspiration picture:

     To be honest my first thoughts were "Did they send me the right inspiration picture?". It is a lovely picture, but since almsot all of my cakes are weird, sculpted, and heavily pop-culture influenced I was a bit perplexed by this Martha Stewart Weddings style request. I do love cakes like this, but they are certainly out of my comfort zone as far as making them. I live in beat-up t-shirts and camoflauge pants, "pretty" usually isn't in my vocabulary :) But, what the hell, I am a weak human being and wanted to be able to say "hey, one of my cakes is in a magazine".

     Right off the bat I knew exactly how I wanted my cake to look, but was worried about execution. The last time I attempted covering a double barrel tier many tears were shed and f bombs dropped. This time I used the method in this tutorial found from  Party Cakes found here. It worked like a charm. I did have a seam, which I just hid in the back :)

     My other worry was my shaky hands when doing detail work. I wanted the trees to have nice, sharp edges like the inspiration picture but wasn't sure how. Then it hit me, painter's tape! A great tool for working on fondant and gumpaste, I use the "delicate surfaces" kind. I trimmed the tape and applied it in the tree shape, piped my royal, then peeled the tape off right away, no problems!

 

For the cake itself I started with white fondant, and then airbrushed it grey. I rolled long strips of fondant for the hills, layered them on the cake and then airbrushed them as well. Then I used royal icing to make the trees and snow, and red berries. The birds and moon were painted gumpaste, adhered with royal. Here is the finished result