what have i been doing? part two

This is what I've been doing for the last three days. Thursday, Friday, Saturday. I was making a cake, and who knew it would take so long?

A friend of mine from the local knitting group, Laura Phillippi (i think i've seen that name before, on an army uniform, actually. hmm) is the curator of the Lansing Historical Museum. She was soliciting entries for a Kansas Day cake decorating contest, and I had been reading a book on a cake decorating technique ("The Whimsical Bakehouse") and it all just came together. I designed a cake, around the theme of wheat traveling from Russia to Kansas, and I used the decorating technique from the book to create wheat stalks and small, partial versions of the US map and of Russia.

This picture has a top view of the cake, so that you can see Russia and the United States better. The U.S.A. has a small square that is to symbolize Kansas.

The wheat stalks, and the map pieces, were made out of melted chocolate and candy coating. It's laid down in layers to make the designs. I did find that it's not as easy to do as the book seems to say. I'm not sure how the book's authors managed to make fine lines with the melted chocolate...my chocolate kept hardening inside the decorating bag when I tried fine lines, so that I had a minimum line size that I could use. And if you try this, use disposable decorating bags to hold the melted chocolate. It's much simpler to throw away a used bag than to empty out hardened chocolate. The chocolate designs are more fragile than you might think, so make more designs than you think you might need, and handle carefully.


And the little girl helping me bake a cake. Cute, no?