Originally Posted by GailG
OMGsh -- that cake does look like fondant. I do cakes, also (I'm learning that many of us quilters also do cakes.) Where were the breaks? It's not obvious at all. Your decorating is beautiful. How did you get the buttercream so smooth? Also how did you support the three-tiered cake over the hexes?
Tell me more -- what kind of cake was it and what were the fillings?
Thanks for your kind comments. The three tiers on the top of the 5-tier base should have had one more, larger tier under them. Three of the corners of that cake just crumbled completely off in my car ... I have NEVER had that happen in 39 years of baking! So I just pre-cut the useable portion of that tier, wrapped them in napkins (yes, this is a pretty retro-type thing to do, but makes it easy for guests to snag a piece on their way out the door for home), and put them in a cake box to sit out after the rest of the cake had been cut.
If you look at the bottom tier of the top three, you can see the front corner on the left appears to be more of a slight diagonal than a straight verticle line. That's the most obvious spot (at least to me). That tier also had issues, but not quite so bad as the larger one.
As for any other problems, the beauty of the decorating style the Bride & Groom selected is that I could make the ganache branches as craggy and crooked as I wanted, which allowed me to cover a TON of cracked icing spots, areas where a thumb or finger may have dented the icing, or whatever imperfections I could find. The "swirling leaves" also helped here, too.
Everything was supported with plenty of bamboo skewers cut to size. I use them because they are thin, very lightweight, but incredibly strong and I can generally cut them very straight with a pair of pruning shears I use only for that purpose. I also will use skewers without the points cut off to push through tiers to keep the entire thing from shifting if anyone should happen to bump the table.
As for the flavors, are you ready? There was:
Spice
Carrot with Cream Cheese filling
Fudge Chocolate Chunk with Chocolate Mousse filling
Fudge Chocolate Chunk with Strawberry filling
Fudge Chocolate Chunk with Raspberry filling
White Chocolate Lemon with Raspberry filling
While Almond Sour Cream with Blueberry filling
I think they were very happy. And I am glad that so many people have made me feel better about my own personal disaster with this cake. Makes me realize that when I decided to do this as a sideline, it was the right way to go, for me anyway.