Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Cake Tuesday: dancing to a different beat.

What do you get when a world-class percussionist and a professional drummer fall in love?

A super-cool, musical wedding, including a wedding cake that mixes drums with small percussion instruments. There's a full-sized tom tom, snare, tambourine, and shaker. I even made drum sticks with the couple's name as the logo (the clever bride's idea!):

The tambourine was the trickiest - I had to make the jingles in advance, and was guessing at all the sizes. Then the day of the wedding when I started putting it together, I made the wood-grain fondant and then hand cut all the openings for the pairs of jingles before tacking down the skin with the edible tacks.

The drum pieces were pretty difficult, too - everything was estimated because you (you being I) never know exactly how much frosting/fresh fruit will affect the height of the final cake, and all the sugar work has to be done in advance so it will dry, so then the day of when it's all coming together you're just holding your breath that it will all work out. And it did. This may be one of my favorite cakes of all time. Not at all traditional, and very challenging, but I have never been happier with the end result.