Mountain Bike Groom's Cake

Happy Sunday!  This week’s featured cake is the groom’s cake that went with Jen’s wedding cake from last week. John requested a mountain bike themed cake, so I sketched a few ideas for them:

John liked the one last one with the cake carved into the shape of terrain with hills and rocks.

I started by making the “shrubbery”… green fondant shaped into little blobs (very technical terms here) and snipped with scissors to give it a leafy texture.  After they set up, I went back and painted them a couple of different colors of green to highlight the texture.

To go along with the bushes, I sculpted several trees out of modeling chocolate.  I have several clay sculpting tools that I used to give the bark some texture (don’t worry, I only use them for cakes!)

Next I made the rocks from some white fondant.  To make fondant rocks, I roll out a piece of fondant about a half an inch thick and chop it up into irregular shapes with a large chef’s knife…simple but it looks exactly like rocks! 

I tossed the pieces with some black, green, and gray food coloring to give them some color.  My fingers got quite a bit of color as well!

While all the sugar work was drying, I worked on the cake itself.  I started with a half sheet cake, which a cut up into pieces to resemble the side of a mountain.  (Without the frosting, it just looked like a pile of cake)

But once all the detail were added, it really looked like a bike trail. Its hard to see everything in the picture though.  The trail is brown sugar and piped some extra grass and shrubs with green buttercream.

Next week I start constructing a portable cooling carrier for a wedding cake I’m driving to Indiana!  Four hours in a car in the middle of the summer spells disaster for cake made with real butter, but I have a plan!  I’ll post pictures of my contraption next week and stay tuned the following week to hear about the trip!