I had everything finished except for the decorative stripes by the end of Thursday night. I knew I’d have only until 3pm on Friday to finish up before we needed to both be dressed, packed, and have the car loaded to head straight to the wedding site. We got up at 8am, and I thought, “Surely 7 hours is more than enough time to put a few stripes on a cake, right?” You see where this is going.

I got up and immediately got to work setting up the dining room with everything I’d need to get it done.

The first item of business was to continue dying that piece of fondant navy blue with the two extra bottles of dye I’d gone out for the day before.

I’m gonna go ahead and show you this totally unflattering photo of me still in my pajamas just so you can see how rapt Lucas was with the swishy noises my gloves were making while I was kneading the fondant.

I am so glad I decided to buy two extra bottles of dye, because I used every last drop of both of them and even still I wish I had been able to get it a bit darker. Really, I needed a drop of black to make it the right shade of navy, but I got it close. I spent a solid hour adding dye and kneading it in and then even more time kneading in cornstarch to dry the fondant out a bit since all that dye made it a little too sticky.

Then, I had to clean up the area, re-dust it with cornstarch, and roll out the fondant. I had Jeff do some quick math for me to figure out how long I needed to make the stripes by determining the circumference from the diameter. Stay in school, kids.

The largest tier needed stripes over a yard long! I had a lot of trouble with the stripes breaking as I was adhering them. I did my best to get the longest pieces possible onto the front of the cake and then fill in the back and try to hide the seams. Turns out the surface of my table was uneven and it kept making uneven stripes when I tried to cut on it. I lost a lot of time re-rolling and re-cutting to get a nice even thickness.

I also spent a lot of extra time trying to make the stripes perfectly parallel. I realized after the wedding was over that I should have made templates to line the stripes up against for perfect lines. Now I know.

To adhere the stripes, you just brush the surface with a little water, being careful not to let it run. The water partially dissolves the fondant sugars on the surface, which then dissolve and bond with the sugars in the stripes. I had lot of trouble with the dye from the stripes running slightly and making a bit of a blue halo. I spent a huge chunk of time blotting it with paper towels to absorb the excess moisture, and then literally shaving the smeared dye off with an exacto knife. You’re starting to see where that 7 hours went now aren’t you?

Here’s an example of that “elephant skin” effect I was talking about last time. It’s sort of wrinkly and cracked looking. This happens when either the fondant is too dry or has been handled too much. In my case, it’s the dryness from having to use cornstarch to keep it from sticking to the table. For my next cake I’m going to invest in an oversized silicone mat to roll fondant out on. You don’t have to use cornstarch with one of those, reducing the possibility of unsightly elephant skin.

The whole time I was busy finishing the cake, Jeff was busy getting everything possible packed and in the car so we could head out ASAP. I finished with about an hour to spare, just enough time to get myself showered and dressed and pack the the last of my stuff up. We both carried the cake tiers out to the car and secured them in the back, then headed off on our 2+ hour drive to Lafayette, GA.

We got to the wedding site about 2 hours before the rehearsal was set to start. I immediately got to work stacking the cakes on the wooden pedestal the wedding site provided for me. I used a paintbrush to brush off the excess cornstarch from the outside of the cake. Then, and this will sound really weird, I brushed the entire cake with a thin layer of shortening. I did this because the fondant had gotten dried out from the cornstarch and I needed to add some moisture back. Shortening helps to smooth out cracks and imperfections, but at the cost of making the cake shiny. I hoped that it would dry out a bit in the fridge before the wedding the next day.

On Saturday, the wedding day, all the wedding party needed to be at the site by 3pm for group photos. I spent this time putting the final touches on the cake which would need to be brought out at 5pm just before the ceremony started. I was so tired! (BTW, I chopped all my hair off! It was not cooperating that day though with all the heat and humidity.)

There was a bit of stress the previous day because some extra flowers had been saved for me to decorate the cake with, but they were all refusing to open. Luckily, they somehow all magically bloomed overnight and I had plenty to work with.

I put a silver “T” for Tucker on top and used some leftover boutonniere pins to pin a few roses just underneath it. The last step was to adhere the bow. I took all the pieces out and shaved off excess material with an exacto knife, then stuck them to the cake with a little water. One of the bow tails cracked as it draped over the edge of the cake, so I made a paste out of cornstarch and shortening and painted it into the crack. You would never know it was damaged.

This is not the best picture ever, but you can see what the finished bow looked like when all the pieces were laying next to each other.

That’s it for all the prep work. Next is the wedding and the finished cake!

I LOVE baking, I LIKE crumb coating and frosting, but I HATE working with fondant. This stuff is so finicky and delicate and heavy and sticky. One wrong move and you’ve ruined it, and this stuff ain’t cheap. There really is no room for error.

My trials with fondant began early in the week when I decided to go ahead and dye a piece that I would later be using to make striped trim around the cake. I needed to get this small chunk of fondant to a deep navy blue, and after an entire bottle of navy gel dye and a half hour of kneading and squeezing, I still had only this…

That’s decidedly not navy. It was obvious that I was gonna need a LOT more dye to reach the deep color I was looking for, so I knew I’d need to schedule time during the week to make another trip to the cake supply store for more dye.

BTW, if you’re in the Atlanta area and are in need of professional cake decorating supplies, I cannot recommend Cake Art enough. I could not believe there was an entire store dedicated to cake decorating that was only a few miles from my house. Their staff is extremely helpful and I would have been in serious trouble if I ever found myself in need of more supplies that I could only find online. They even have classes!

Anyway, since I couldn’t finish that project that day, I moved on to creating a bow ornament out of fondant. I can never find my preferred brand of fondant; Satin Ice, in small quantities, so I purchased this Pettinice brand instead in a 1.5 pound size. The thing about Pettinice is that it’s a lot stickier and bendier. I needed to firm it up a bit so that it would hold it’s shape well for making the bow, so I added corn starch in small batches until it felt like the right consistency.

I rolled a small piece of it out on a SilPat (non-stick silicone mat) and used an exacto knife to cut out the shapes for each part of the bow. I then made some pleats in the tails and stuffed the loops with some saran wrap so they wouldn’t flatten out as they dried.

I set them on their own little board and let them set up in the fridge.

Now here’s the real fun part – covering the cakes with the fondant.

You want to first measure your cake to see how large you need to roll out the fondant. You measure across the diameter and up the sides, then add a few inches to make sure you have enough to work with. My biggest cake layer needed a circle of fondant nearly a yard across! It barely even fit on the table.

The professionals use a kind of giant pasta roller machine to make fondant sheets of a perfectly even thickness, I used my biggest heaviest rolling pin and went to town. I had to use a lot of cornstarch to keep the fondant from sticking to the table or to the rolling pin. You constantly need to be running your hand underneath the sheet to make sure it’s not sticking anywhere, and add more cornstarch if it is.

If you find any air bubbles you can pop them with a pin then roll over them a few times to squeeze the air out and smooth out the scar. Keep rotating the fondant to make a nice circular sheet. Use a yard stick to see if it’s big enough. If it’s not big enough and you’ve already got it rolled paper thin, you might have to wad it up and knead in more fondant, then start over. It’s a pain, and I got lucky this time that I had enough to work with for each layer. I still don’t know how many pounds of fondant are needed to cover different sizes of cake.

Here’s the part that absolutely kills my nerves. First, there’s getting it onto the cake without stretching or tearing it. My favorite way to do this is to put both of my arms underneath it with my palms facing up, and then lift it straight up and place it straight down on the cake. Professionals usually roll it around a rolling pin and then unfurl it across the cake. I don’t do this because I’m clumsy and because rolling the fondant when you’ve worked a lot of cornstarch into it can cause a wrinkly surface texture known as “elephant skin.” I’m looking into getting a huge silicone mat to roll out fondant on so that I won’t have to use cornstarch anymore. That’ll take care of the elephant skin problem for good.

Once you get it on the cake, you need to work quickly to smooth the fondant over it seamlessly before it starts to dry out and become less pliable. This is definitely a skill that needs to be practiced to be mastered, and I am nowhere near mastering it. You can start by smoothing it across the top, then the technique is to lift the curtain of fondant up and, starting towards the bottom of the cake, you smooth it upwards with your hand. You have to keep lifting and smoothing until it’s all tucked in. Really difficult because there’s more material hanging over the edge of the cake than there is surface to smooth it onto.

That’s it almost finished, just a few more wrinkles to lift and smooth. At this point you should use a smoothing tool to get the angles really crisp. It’s basically a flat piece of plastic with a handle that you run all over the cake with light pressure. You then run it up and down the sides to make a sharp edge at the bottom. Then you can cut the excess fondant off with a pizza cutter. I always leave about and inch extra though because fondant can tend to shrink up a bit in the fridge. So once I’m sure it won’t shrink anymore I go back with an exacto knife and cut it right at the edge.

The last thing I had to do before decorating was to add the support rods. Cake is heavy. I buy these plastic dowels and then cut them to size.

You want them to come right to the top of the fondant. Any higher and you’ll see a gap between the tiers, lower and the tier above will squish the one below. It takes a lot of adjusting to get each dowel the exact height it needs to be. You can see below that the dowel on the right needs to lose about a millimeter off the top. You wriggle it out, wipe it off, and carefully trim the edge with scissors. I finished this up around 11pm.

All that’s left to do is to decorate it and transport it to the wedding site!

Little did I know just how crazy my last morning of work on the cake would be…

Whew! The wedding was this past weekend and now I can finally say that I’m done with cake decorating for a while (I have another one to do in September.) I’ll show you the week-long process I went through to make it next time, but for now let’s wrap up our Boulder vacation with more delicious food!

If you know me, you know that I love Japanese food. Every time we go on vacation I try to find the best sushi restaurant in the area for us to try. This time, I found two that I could not choose between, so we went to both!

First up was Amu Izakaya. An izakaya is a casual restaurant that focuses on sake and beer with an extensive menu of small dishes, few of them being what most people would consider sushi.

We started off with a small bottle of sake which was served to us in this gorgeous earthenware pottery. Now I really want one of these for the house!

We ordered lots of small dishes to share, starting with a fluke sashimi and snapper carpaccio in yuzu cream with salmon roe. I’d never had fluke before but loved the clean lemony flavor. The snapper was soft and bright-tasting.

We had two kinds of Pacific oysters, one was Kumamoto but I can’t remember the name of the other. Both were excellent and still chilly on their bed of ice. We also shared some grilled eel with the skin still on. It was fatty and soft and delicious.

Then our favorites of the night, gindara misoyaki and a green tea soba with duck soup for dipping. Gindara (black cod) is my very favorite fish but I can rarely find it anywhere to prepare at home, so it’s become a treat I just have to have anytime we see it on the menu. This one was fall-apart perfect with it’s little ribbon of crispy skin and thin salty miso glaze.

The duck soup was out of this world with big chunks of duck floating in the rich broth. The soba were cold and springy, chewy and sweet. Easily the best soba dish I’ve ever had.

Finally, dessert. I’ve had mochi ice cream once before and didn’t care for it. Apparently I just had a bad one, because these little mochi ice creams were so addictingly good! There was only a thin skin of mochi incasing the creamy, not-too-cold ice cream in flavors of green tea, red bean, and pistachio. The pistachio was the clear winner for both of us.

Amu is the kind of authentic izakaya experience I wish we had in Atlanta. There are a few very good ones in Atlanta, but none as classy and traditional as Amu. Definitely check this one out if you have the chance.

Before I show you yet more Japanese food, here’s a few shots of one of the best lunches we had on the trip at a Latin restaurant called Aji.

We decided to share a bunch stuff because there were too many yummy things on the menu to choose from. We had a snapper ceviche with pickled red onions, a pork empanada with a corn masa crust, and duck taquitos with a spicy slaw. All of these were excellent and we had a hard time deciding wether to order something else or just get more of these!

We did eventually decide to split the enchiladas though, and it was definitely the right choice. They were filled with crisp grilled vegetables and topped with the freshest guacamole, salsa, and thin tomatoey enchilada sauce. I could have eaten ten of these if I weren’t so stuffed.

And onward to our sushi dinner! We hit up Sushi Tora after reading many reviews claiming that it’s the best sushi in Boulder

We started with the tempura mushrooms that were amazing. There were shiitakes, oyster, and a few enoki mushrooms, all lightly fried and served with bitter green tea for dipping. I could not stop eating them. Usually mushrooms soak up too much oil when fried, but these were still fresh and springy with a deep earthy flavor.

We got two snapper nigiri in a yuzu pepper vinaigrette that were outstanding. And any time monkfish liver (ankimo) is on the menu we have to have some. This was a particularly good bit of it too, firm but creamy with a slight peanut butter flavor.

Various maki rolls that were all really tasty and cut to the correct size. I have a pet peeve about sushi that is prepared too large to be eaten in one bite. Very happy to be able to inhale these as intended. 😉

Jeff got an uni gunkan. I can’t stand the stuff. I used to try it every time we went out for sushi hoping that I just hadn’t had the good stuff yet, but it always makes me gag. Tastes like ice cold runny peanut butter and fish flavored snot if you ask me.

And because why not, more mochi ice creams! This time we got blueberry and salted cherry blossom. The blueberry was crazy good, and the cherry blossom tasted mostly like vanilla but with a faint almost rose-like aroma in the back of the throat.

Sushi Tora definitely lived up to the hype. So glad we were able to find two excellent Japanese restaurants in Boulder.

Well that wraps up the trip. Overall, we enjoyed ourselves a ton and really liked Boulder, but we didn’t quite fall in love with it the way we did with the Pacific Northwest. I happen to love rainy gloomy weather, so a city like Seattle is actually a good match for me. It’s kinda funny to say that I would miss the rain in such a sunny and beautiful place as Boulder, but that’s just what I like.

Ok! I cannot wait to show you the wedding cake process from last week. I’m still editing the photos from the wedding, but I should be able to show it all to you soon.

If you had to pack up your life and move to another city of your choosing, where would you go?