Cake Bossette

I watch a lot of those food shows where people make those really cool cakes.  I decided that I wanted to have a really cool cake for my daughters birthday party.

As I have mentioned before, her theme was a honey bee so I wanted to have some kind of bee or beehive cake.

I have a friend who makes beautiful cakes so I asked her about it and she offered a cake to make for me but... for $85.  *Le Sigh*  This is actually a REALLY great price for the cuteness of the cake but I had a hard time willing to spend that much on a cake.

Now remember, I am not a baker.  I am an average Joette who has never done this before and seeing if this is something that a regular average person can do!

Where to start?  I started making a list of what I would need if I wanted to make it myself:

• Cake mold
• Cake mix (including the ingredients)
• Frosting
• Food coloring (optional)
• Sugar molds (optional)
• Fondant
• Powdered sugar
• Cake icing tip (mine was called star even though it wasn't five points)
• Cake icing bag (those triangle things you see bakers squeezing frosting out of)
• coupler; the plastic thing that holds the icing bag to the icing tip without frosting oozing everywhere.
• Tall cup/drinking glass/mug

Okay, so now that I have an idea of what I need, what do I do now?  Go to Amazon:

• The first thing I did was go to Amazon.com to see what kind of cake molds were out there.  I found one of a beehive.  $30 hmmm, kind of expensive but lucky me, I have a gift card from my family.  I think I still would have bought it even if I didn't have the gift card.  Now I can keep it for the rest of my life and possibly give it to my daughter for when she has kids!  Saves her money.

• Next, I looked for cute little bee decorations and found that you can buy sugar molds for cheap and in pretty much any kind of thing you want it.  The only problem I ran into was the packaging.  There was one company that claimed that you should be worried about good packaging.  They claimed that if you did not have good packaging that you would receive your sugar molds in pieces.  They were charging $7 for 12 bees.  Another company was charging $5 for 24 bees but did not mention anything about their packaging so I did get worried.  I ordered both.  Once I received the bees in the mail, the first company did an extremely good job packaging the bees.  None of them broke BUT the second company threw all the bees into a little plastic bag and none of them broke either.  So I am suspecting that as long as there are no easily breakable features on the moldings then don't worry about the packaging.   My bees were pretty much a circle with nothing sticking out so they were fine.

• Last, on Amazon, I bought black food dye.  $7 for a huge thing of it so I will never have to buy black dye food coloring again.  EVER.

Then I went to the store and bought 2 boxes of cake mix (classic yellow), 3 containers of frosting (2 white, 1 chocolate), eggs, veggie oil (following cake mix directions) and fondant.  $14.

Once I figured out what I needed (and got it) it was time to go and make my cake!

I used 2 boxs of cake mix.  1 for each side. 

Step One:  Make the cakes.  I  realized that the cake mold I bought was kinda small.  Very small in fact and would only feed probably about 20 people when I was going to have about 50 people at the house.  How do I solve this.... hmmmm...  I KNOW!  I pulled out my 9 inch round cake pans (happen to have them from making homemade pizzas).  It actually didn't really matter to me if they were round, square, 9 inches, 10 inches or whatever.  Just something that would look okay and feed more people.  I obviously had to buy more cake mix and frosting.

Then I removed the excess.

Step Two:  Remove any excess cake.  You can see the picture of what I mean above but when it came to the round cakes it was a little more difficult.  You want your cakes to be flat so if you pull your cake out of the oven and there is a huge dome then you have to cut it off as best as you can so that they are flat and level.

Step Three:  Put the pieces together.  I have a total of 4 cake pieces; 2 round ones and 2 halves of a bee hive.  

• I take one of the round ones and frost the top with icing (I used the white frosting).  
• Then I add the second round one to the top (with the cut part facing down).  
• I then frosted those two pieces like normal.   
• Now for the bee hive.  Before putting the pieces on the round cake I frosted the middle parts and put them together before putting them on top of the cake.  
• They didn't really want to stay together so I had to frost the whole thing real quick and then put them in the fridge to chill and that seemed to work with keeping everything together.

Step Four:  Roll out the fondant and make black frosting.  

• RULE:  DO NOT ROLL OUT THE FONDANT UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO PUT IT ON THE CAKE.  I did not do this and let it sit so it dried out and was unusable.  Super sad that I had to buy more.  
• To make black frosting, you need the chocolate frosting and only a few drops of the black dye.   I am an idiot and used white frosting the first go around and couldn't figure out why my frosting was turning out purple.  My cake friend told me to use chocolate.  Duh... I should have figured that one out but I didn't.
• NOTE: if your frosting is too runny then add powdered sugar to thicken it up.
• Now roll out your fondant.  Mine came in a square and I had to put powdered sugar on the counter to roll it out.  

Step five:  Put the fondant on.

• At first I rolled it out too thin and it tore to pieces so I had to ball it up and try again.  Once I got it big enough to where it might fit, but not see through, I knew it was good to go.
• Next I pulled the cake out from the fridge and put dots of new frosting on (since the frosting on it was now chilled therefore a little hard) to act as glue for the fondant.
• Wrap the fondant around the cake like a blanket.  This was a pain in the @##!  I am not sure if it was because my cake was round but after a little bit of time, I managed to cover, cut off the extra and tried to work the seams so that you couldn't tell they were there.  It was not perfect but I figured I would cover them with bees.
• Pat the fondant so that it takes the shape of the mold.

Step six: Add frosting and sugar molds

• Take the cake icing bag and cut the tip off (bottom of the V)
• unscrew the coupler so that there are two pieces
• Take the larger part of the coupler and put together with the frosting tip and insert into bag so that the frosting tip is sticking out of the hole
• Screw the second piece of the coupler onto the first part (over the plastic)
• Put frosting into the frosting bag.  The best way to do this is to get a large cup, insert the bag (with the tip at the bottom of the cup) and fold over the top plastic part so that it is easy to get the frosting down to the bottom without creating too many air pockets
• Once you have enough frosting in it, twist the top and start making little stars.
• I put a little star in a spot where I wanted a bee and found that the frosting was perfect to glue the sugar moulds onto the cake.

I would give it a few practice squirts so that you can get the look that you want

So here is the cake that I made:

Anyone who saw it in person thought it was amazing.  

How much did I spend?  er...   well, lets find out:

Cake mix: 4 boxes @ .99 ea = ~$4

Frosting: 3 containers @ .99 ea = $3

Dye = $7

Bees = $12

Fondant = $7

Total:  $33

Not bad but if I hadn't had the gift card or most of the mentioned items, it would have been:

Same as above = $33

Cake mold = $30

Icing bag, coupler and star = ~$10

Powdered Sugar = $2

Veggie oil = $3

Eggs = $1.50

I hope this is okay but I am going to assume that everyone has a cup.

Total:  $79.50

BAM!!!  Still cheaper 

Remember:  This took me a bit of time and let me tell you it would have been nice to have the extra time for something else AND to have someone else worry about it. At least I have left over bees, dye, cake mold and a better knowledge of fondant for a future cake!