Fire Academy Graduation

This past Friday my cousin John Paul graduated from Austin Fire Academy, unfortunately due to prior plans I wasn't able to attend the ceremony nor the BBQ that they had for him, but i can make a kick-ass cake! I wanted something totally unexpected, something that would knock their socks off! "How about a burning building...dammit that was his grooms cake when he got married. A fire engine...nah they'd be expecting that. I GOT IT...A FIREMAN'S HELMET!" For weeks i studied a tutorial as to how to go about making this ginormous cake, and I think I got it down pretty good.

I used 2- 9x13" cakes and 1- 10" cake, both were butter vanilla and filled with vanilla and chocolate icing. Each cake was torted into two layers, but since there was going to be 6 layers of cake I divided the cake into 2 sections of 3 layers each. Before putting the top three layers I put 5 bubble tea straws for support and a cardboard separator cut to dimensions of the cake. After all layers were assembled I began the messy tedious task of carving the cake to make it look like a helmet. Using a helmet that my uncle used when he was a fireman I was able to make a very convincing helmet shape. Take a look....

(Front view of the cake after it was stacked and filled)

(Almost done carving...This baby was huge!)


Now most of my cakes are iced in buttercream and then smoothed to give that polished finished, but for this cake i needed something really pristine so I covered the cake in homemade fondant. In case you didn't know fondant is a sugar dough that is rolled out and placed on top of a cake. It's edible, super sweet, and can be a pain. I crumb coated the cake and then colored and rolled out the fondant to cover this mammoth cake.








Once this was done I covered a piece of cardboard with more yellow fondant (to make the brim), then placed the cake on top. Next I rolled out snakes of yellow and attached them to the hat. Finally a snake of black fondant was rolled and placed around the brim.



Here is the final product!

As mentioned before, I wasn't able to make it to the ceremony or party luckily two of my aunts were and happily became my delivery team. This cake traveled 5 hours to Austin, TX and arrived safe and sound!

(boxed and ready for transport)

(The best delivery team!)

In the planning of this cake I wanted to add something to give it that extra kick, so I had made an axe, that was to accompany the cake, out of rice cereal treats but sad it enough I had to scratch that off due to the cake being so huge. Although it didn't make the cake here is what it looked like...

The blade part was going to be painted in an edible silver paint and wood detailing on the handle, but since it was making the cut it wasn't finished.

Well I hope you guys like this cake, it was a huge undertaking but super fun! Let me know what you think!

Have a Great Thursday!

Luv,
-Chris-