Electric Guitar Cake

Last month was Spud’s birthday and Spud (being an artist himself) always gives me the best cake challenges for his birthday.  Luckily for me, he is also happy to be an artistic consultant and helper in these ventures.

For his 16th birthday (you guys!  I started this blog when we was a newborn *gasp*) he had me model the cake after the electric guitar he just bought with the money he made from his first job.

Here's a pic from the second month of the blog (baby!) and here is the same kiddo (hands only for privacy) making homemade croissants this summer (teenager!)

He knew he wanted chocolate cake with chocolate frosting, because that’s how this family rolls.  And we knew it needed to be a bright royal blue.  I was thinking aloud and mentioned mirror glaze for shine and Spud’s eyes lit up.  The thing is…I’ve only made mirror glaze once before.  I nailed it the first time but my confidence wasn't super high on a repeat, but he was sold.

To make the cake, I used a 12x18 inch sheet pan and loaded it up with 3 doctored cake mixes (recipe here) , stretching my stand mixer’s capacity to the absolute max.  To achieve this, I lowered the oven temp to 325 and baked for nearly an hour.

After the behemoth of a cake was baked, I had Spud sketch out the guitar shape on a large cake board and cut it out.  Once the cake was completely cooled, I used the board as a guide to cut the guitar shape (slightly smaller than the board to leave room for icing.)  I flipped the cake back onto the board, then doubled wrapped and froze the cake overnight.

At this point it was fairly late at night, but I made some marshmallow fondant and Spud and I worked to make all of the electric guitar details (he used silver luster dust to paint the details).

The most challenging detail was the strings and frets.  Should I paint them? Make them out of fondant?  Use actual wire (I was about to)? Nothing seemed right.  

Now, feel how you will about AI, but imma say it has its uses.  I posed my question to AI and it suggested dry spaghetti painted with edible silver spray.  YOU GUYS!  Seriously!  I never would’ve thought of that! When I saw it I screamed and ran to tell Spud (who was in bed at the time) and he was like, “I know, you yelled really loud”.  Fine Spud, it was mind blowing to me.

The next day, (after getting the dry spaghetti and the silver spray and spraying outside) I made the frosting (recipe here), and frosted the cake, taking lots of time to make the frosting as smooth as possible.  At this point, I utilize an old trick of using Viva paper towels to gently smooth a slightly crusted frosting (only Viva paper towels work, since they don’t have a pattern imprinted like other brands).  I then froze the cake again, but because I’d worked so hard for smoothing, I did not wrap it, plus, it was only going to be in for as long as it took to make the mirror glaze.

Finally it was mirror glaze (aka panic) time.  Since I was panicking I doubled the morrow glaze recipe (recipe here) but probably didn’t need to and thankfully it went off without a hitch.  The only difference from the recipe directions was that I did not divide the glaze into separate bowls to tint in different shades since I only needed one solid color.  To achieve the bright electric guitar blue, I used a combination of bright white, royal blue, and navy blue, adding drops and stirring until I got the color I was looking for.

This time around, I ended up with a rather large amount of foamy bubbles at the top of my bowl of mirror glaze.  I tried straining them out and it worked…a little.    Eventually, I ended up skimming the bubbles off with a spoon (similar to skimming the grease off soup), since I absolutely did not want bubbles on the surface of the guitar cake.

I did end up moving the cake from the freezer (in the garage) to the fridge (in the kitchen) while I waited (and waited and waited) for the mirror glaze to reach the correct temperature.

I poured, the mirror glaze was perfect (what?!?)I had way too much leftover, and then Spud helped me place all of the fondant detailing that we’d made the night before.  And you guys!  I am so proud of this cake!  I thought the Jordan Ones were going to be the most complicated cake that child threw at me, but I think the electric guitar beat it.

Can’t wait to see what he comes up with next year!