Tasty Tunes

I’m super excited to share with you the details of my latest cake.  Lately I’ve been eager to do more challenging cakes, and this one definitely fit the bill.

This cake was requested by a young lady as a surprise for her boyfriend’s 20th birthday.  She sent me a few pictures of his guitar and asked me to replicate it in cake.  The Tool Man and I were really excited to take on the challenge.  Actually, I think the Tool Man was more excited than I was.  He even went so far as to print out a perfect scale model on his CAD program for me to use when carving the cake.  Although, for stability’s sake, I ended up cutting the neck of the guitar a little wider than it actually should have been.

Thankfully, the decorating process couldn’t have gone any smoother!  Everything went according to plan.  No hiccups. No crashes.  No rips, tears, settling, or any other cake decorating nightmares.  You never know what might happen when you are dealing with mediums as finicky as cake and sugar.

A few of the things the client requested for the cake were some “stickers” on the guitar and a Jack Johnson “autograph.”  (I have to admit that I had to do an internet search to find out who Jack Johnson was.  My best guess is that he plays a guitar. Lol.)

Without a doubt, the most stressful part of this cake was piping the strings.  It was the very last thing I did on the cake.  It’s not easy piping perfectly straight, unbroken lines nearly two feet long.  And, no, I didn’t manage to pipe perfectly straight, unbroken lines, but they turned out pretty good, I think.

I achieved the finish on the guitar body using my air brush.  First I covered the cake with a sheet of “red” fondant.  (It was actually more pink than red.)  Once the cake was covered, I sprayed the guitar a deep, rich red.  Then I used brown and black to add the wood grain details.  I was really pleased with the way it turned out.

Everything on this cake is edible except for a couple of toothpicks used to secure the gold knobs into the top of the guitar.  The body of the guitar was white cake and the neck was chocolate.  The entire cake was filled and iced with cream cheese icing and then covered with my homemade marshmallow fondant.  The knobs, sticker, and frets were made with gum paste.  The stickers and autograph were hand-painted with gel food coloring thinned with vanilla flavoring.  And as I mentioned earlier, the strings were piped with royal icing, then hand-painted with edible metallic dust.  The entire cake was 30 inches long.

Thanks, Savannah, for asking me to do this cake. I had a blast!

Lindsey