Showing posts with label decorate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label decorate. Show all posts

Monday, May 11, 2009

Baking and Decorating Cakes

I think I am a true Gemini, leading two lives. In another life, when I was working on my Engg. degree, I was baking cakes and desserts on the side. It started off as making cakes for family members and then I started getting orders for specialized cakes. I even started teaching how to bake cakes from my home in India. That was my creative outlet then and now it is pottery. Someday I will post pictures of the cakes I made then.

My wife, Reema has been pestering me to bake a fancy cake since we got married. I still do bake occasionally but never spent the time decorating as I used to. On our 5th year Anniversary she insisted on a 5 tier cake and I had to decline. That was 2 years back and the number of expected tiers was only increasing with every year. This year however she turned 30 and I wanted to make her a 3 tier cake (more managable).
So I did it all from scratch. The cake was a vanilla butter cake with chocolate chips. The cakes were leveled and have a chocolate fudge layered icing. Then covered with butter cream icing for the fondant.
The fondant was made from scratch as well and I had forgotten what a mess it can be. Fun none the less.
The invidual cakes were covered, stacked, and decorated further. The roses on top took a lot more time than I expected (2.5 hours for 4 roses).

The cake took a little less than 30 hours... a lot longer than it would have taken me some years back. At the end of it, we had a fun time and it was a pleasure making that cake. Happy Birthday!

Monday, May 4, 2009

Process of decorating


Since I mentioned the construction of the jars in my last post, I thought I would follow it up with the decoration process. This technique is similar to the previous process of slip decoration, but it is a lot more tedious and time consuming. The textured surface (after being carved/stamped) is hand painted with several colors. This does require a lot of patience and a steady hand. Then it is slip decorated. After this it will dry and get bisque fired. In the next stages you will see more contrasting colors being added in the groves to really highlight the colors.

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