The Finished Product, Part 1

Well for all you who have been reading along my first cake gig is completed. I delivered the cake at the specified time on March 27th at the Charleston Boat Cruise by the Aquarium in downtown Charleston.
Stephen is my bestest friend. He helped me with the entire process and even stayed up quite late on Friday night helping me knead and roll out the fondant. I wasn't planning on staying up so late, but once I saw the end in sight, I just wanted to know I had very little to do on the day of the event. So once Stephen arrived home we started on the real work. The cakes had all been made and were cooling and so we started on the chocolate buttercream frosting. We made all the frosting and icing from scratch. We should have made the cakes from scratch too, but I'll do that next time ... probably. Once the chocolate buttercream was made, Stephen started working on the strawberry buttercream while I iced the layers and crumb coated the bottom cake. Here's some pictures of that process:



Next I started on the icing and crumb-coating of the second layer with the strawberry buttercream, while Stephen started rolling out the black fondant for the bottom layer. We had to roll the black out several times to get the right size. It was way bigger then it seemed and then we had to work fast to cut around the edges so the weight of the fondant wouldn't tear itself in the middle of the cake. We were able to do quite well (only one small tear, which was covered by the second layer anyway.) Then I decided to try painting on the diamonds with a stencil that I designed myself using a friend's Cricuit Machine (which is quite an awesome piece of equipment). Thankfully the painting worked. Otherwise we were going to have to hand cut the diamonds and place them on the cake. That would have taken much longer to do. Here's the pictures of this part:


Then we went on to fondant the second layer. This was supposed to be a modeled layer with black gold and white. The first attempt was too dark and it tore on the side and the edges looked horrible. So Stephen and I agreed we should take it off and start again. We ended up going with just gold and white, but it seemed that it would be a much better contrast against the black bottom layer.



Then once those two layers were complete we went to the third and dreaded layer - the circle cake. Circles are very, very hard to fondant (at least for me) and I really wanted this one to look really good - no wrinkles and such. So while I was finishing something else up, my wonderful husband took the liberty to start wrapping the circle cake. He did it perfectly! Not one wrinkle. Awesome! We were well on our way to an awesome looking cake. Check out the circle layer.

This was taken after we stenciled the top of it, but it still looks awesome. So after all these were mostly ready we figured we'd call it a night. The next day was Saturday. I had forgotten when I initially took this job that this Saturday was the Flowertown Festival Weekend. Our family has always gone to it and the girls would be disappointed if we didn't go. So because we were so ahead of schedule I thought we could go for an hour or two and still have plenty of time to do the finishing touches before we had to head out. So we did. (And on a side note we had a great time.)
Once we got home I started right away on the edges of all the layers. The bottom layer received a thin line of white buttercream with white pearlized dots added around the edge. The circle cake was getting a twist of black and gold. The middle layer was to be decorated at the site since we were not placing it on the bottom layer until we arrived. This was done to prevent any major accidents on the car ride. So we left with all our supplies, three cakes, and my camera to go deliver this cake.


I'm going to pause here and pick up the rest of the story in another post. I hear the baby starting to wake up. Oh the suspense ...