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Sunday, May 22, 2011

Congratulations Graduates!

Happy Sunday everyone!  I made this week’s cake for a graduation party for my brother and sister and several close friends.  While I love making cakes for anyone, it is so special to make cakes for friends and family.

We were expecting about 75 people at the party, so I decided to make a sheet cake since that it is the easiest way to serve that many guests.  Since we were honoring 5 graduates from three different schools (high school and college), I wanted recognize each one individually.  

So, I made a graduation cap for each one in their school colors.  I used gumpaste for the caps since I needed them to hold their shape.  I rolled out the mortar board then shaped the part that goes around your head….complete with bunches in the back to look like elastic!  And, yes, the one in front is flat for a reason...you'll see on the final cake.


While the hats were drying, I cut out the 2011 charms to go on the tassels.  The long ones are for the high school graduates and the others are for the college graduates. 


I painted them with edible gold paint so they looked the most like the real thing.  One of the hats needed to be silver, so I painted it with edible silver as well.


Then I moved on to the actual cake!  I was planning to do a vanilla cake filled with strawberry curd and fresh sliced strawberries frosted with lemon buttercream….so delicious!  Since the filling was going to be pretty thick, I piped a “dam” of buttercream around the edge to hold in all the filling.  This also keeps the strawberry color from seeping into the buttercream and making the side of the cake pink.


I then filled it with strawberry curd and laid on the sliced berries . . . and ate a few along the way too J


After I put on the top cake layer, I frosted the whole thing with the crumb coat to seal in any crumbs so the final coat of buttercream would be perfectly smooth.

Once the final coat of buttercream had set up, I placed the hats on the cake and added their tassels (which were handmade out of very thinly cut strips of gumpaste), and piped the words of out royal icing and voila!


Here’s a close up of each hat:





I didn’t forget about Hannah’s, but the picture of that one didn’t turn out…sorry Hannah!

Congratulations to all of you! 

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