Making the Dracula cake- timelapse & sugar mirror tutorial

Hi all,

here’s a little more on how I made the Dracula inspired cake you can see in my previous post, here, alongside 4 other amazing pieces released as part of the Penny Dreadful collaboration preview.

Without further ado, you can see the time-lapse video footage here:

(the cracked mirror tutorial is in another video below)

A little more detail on how I did things.  First, the bottom tier was made first, with deep burgundy fondant using a panelling technique.  Indentations were made on each section to correspond to the features of the muscle armour.  After drying, I lightly dusted the crevices with black and white dusts to highlight and create shadow, then varnished with a mix of corn syrup and water.

sawsen-ali-armour-watermarked

The upper tier I covered in sugarpaste (you can see how in this video here: how to cover a cake dummy in fondant with sharp edges) then indented the design into the fondant much like Shawna McGreevy does in this video here.

After that I hand-painted the red details, airbrushed the tier then blotted it away to give a textured effect, then painted in the dark green details.  Finally I made some of my simple writing icing (video tutorial here) and outlined the details, then painted them in gold exactly as seen in my fondant appliqué kimono design video here.

sawsen-ali-crest-watermarked

 

As promised, here’s the tutorial for how I made the cracked mirror topper:

Initially I tried to keep the topper fully edible, I tried using silver leaf as the backing instead of foil, but found the small creases in the leaf gave a more matt finish and less of a mirror-like shine.  I also tried silver lustre dust, which gave even less of a shine due to it’s particulate nature.  In the end I went for an aluminium foil backing to get as high a shine as possible.  It’s very hard to give a clear picture of this in photos and on film, but I’ve tried my best to show it in the video above.

If you wanted to make a regular (uncracked) mirror, I would recommend pouring the isomalt or boiled sugar directly on to a heatproof mat, with an appropriately shaped foil dam just around the edges and nothing underneath it.  Once it had cooled you could carefully back it with foil, to avoid the puckering effect.

For your reference here’s a pictorial of the process you can download and save:

sawsen-ali-cracked-mirror-tutorial_Collage

I hope you enjoyed watching & reading 🙂

Best wishes,

Sawsen

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