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by Barbara May
Finally, I was ready to start decorating. I made a batch of buttercream icing, except that linked reciped calls for butter and shortening, and I used just unsalted butter because it tastes better. One batch that size ended up being just enough. To color the icing, I used paste food color, which is mighty powerful stuff. To add just a little at a time, dip a toothpick into the paste and then into the icing.
I just included this picture because I'm so pleased that I finally learned how to make the parchment bags (even if I can't do it in 3 seconds like Jacques Torres). I used a regular pastry bag for the green, but it was nice to use the paper ones for the other colors. Especially since at the moment I only have one dedicated buttercream decorating bag (buttercream leaves grease behind in the bag, and even a small amount of grease can break down royal icing).
Anyway, back to the cake. First I outlined the face in grey (black food paste), but then decided that was kind of a false start. So I mixed up some nice, unpleasant green (moss green with a touch of black), and did a crumb coat over the whole cake. This both sealed in the crumbs and gave me a nice green base to work with so I didn't need to worry if my scales had a few gaps between them. Since it was going to be covered with scales anyway, I was pretty sloppy about it.
After the crumb coat, I took a little bit of the white frosting and thinned it with a few drops of water (be careful when doing this, it's easy to over-thin). I put that icing in one pastry bag with a small round tip (2 or 3). I then filled the space within the eyes with the white. The thin texture makes a pretty smooth surface, but to get it extra-smooth, I dipped a small brush into some water and gently brushed over the surface to melt out the bumps.
Since I'd covered by initial facial lines with the crumb coat, I re-drew the face and added evil-looking irises to the eyes with the grey frosting (again with a small round tip). Then I mixed up more of the green icing and started making the scales. I used a leaf tip and piped them in overlapping rows.
And here's the cake with all the scales on (except for where the gift is going to go). The green color ended up being slightly greyer than I had intended, which was ok since it's a Bridezilla cake, but it wasn't the most appetizing color. The scales take quite a bit of icing to do, and I ran out partway through and had to mix up more, which is why the scales aren't all quite the same green.
To fill in the gift box, I used the same technique as with the eyes, just on a larger scale. I thinned the icing just a bit with water and then drew the outline of the box using a small round tip. I started filling it by piping back and forth so that the lines touched and melted together. To get it smooth, I used the same trick with the damp paintbrush. I did that in sections because the box was large enough that the icing would have started to set if I waited until I filled the whole thing.
Here we have the filled in gift box. I don't really like the wavy texture, but that's from the shape of the cake beneath it. I'm actually not really convinced that the shaped cake pan added a lot to this cake, since by the time I put down the crumb coat most of the detail was obscured anyway. It's nice to have the overall shape, of course, but I think it would work just as well to trim a sheet cake to the desired outline, and then just draw the features on top of it.
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