Baby-Quilt Cake.

Baby-Quilt Cake.

After much deliberation and pinterest research for inspiration(my lifeline, as I'm sure it's yours), I turned to my box of patchwork cutters and found a baby blanket cutter! 

My initial idea was to just cover part of the cake with the blanket, like draped over it or something, but once I started actually covering it... I realized I wanted the FULL effect! 

The cake itself is an american style chocolate cake. Filled with a whipped cream cheese frosting and Dulce de Leche(made from scratch). I plastered it with vanilla buttercream and used a THIN marshmallowfondant-"lid" that I could "glue" the patches on to. You can find all the recipes in the menu to the right!

I started by making the sponges and the dulce de leche. I made the sponges a week ahead of time, I wrapped it tightly in cling film after completely cooled and put it in the freezer (makes it easier to carve through the middle when you take it out). The dulce de leche is good in the fridge for up to a month so you can make that whenever(how anyone has been ABLE to keep it for that long without eating it by the spoonful I do not know.. total mystery!!).

I then went ahead and made the flowers and leaves (tutorial to come).

2 days before "delivery" I make the filling and buttercream that will cover the cake or as we say in Sweden: the "plaster". I also will take out the sponges and once slightly thawed I cut through the cake creating 3 separate cake layers or 2 filling layers (hope you get what I mean). I take the top piece of sponge and use it as the bottom upside down, pipe a wall of buttercream around the edge and spread the middle with a thin layer of dulce de leche and fill the rest with the WCC-frosting, add the middle layer of sponge and repeat the process. The reason you turn the sponge upside down is that you get a nice flat top and nice sharp edges as a canvas for your buttercream.

I then "plaster" the cake I will soon have a blogg entry on how to do this to get the best, sharpest flattest, most gorgeous edges ever! By first crumb-coating it and then adding the desired amount of plaster.

I will also have a blogg entry on how to cover with marshmallow fondant. On this cake I covered with a very thin layer as I was going to add a second layer in the form of the patches, and you don't want an extremely thick layer of fondant. 

I then stacked the cake, using doweling and thin plastic cake sheets to separate. I will also try to give you a tutorial on how to do this.

Once all this was done I could finally start with my favorite part... The DECORATING! The colors I used to color the patches was wiltons royal blue, golden yellow, pink as well as sugarflairs holly green.

I had to play around a bit with how I wanted the patches to look. Did I want random sizes, perfect squares, or like I ended up doing pieces that started big and got smaller with each tier.

Now I am not an organized person and if I was to do this again I would certainly plan ahead a bit more and partition around the cake into 12 equal sized sections (not hard to do so I don't know why I didn't). Somehow I still managed to fit in relatively same sized pieces. I rotated the colors: pink, blue, yellow and green.  Then on the next layer I moved the color over one step, as seen on the pictures. The pieces that merge the tiers together had to be narrowed slightly which there is no way of explaining how I did this, as I did it by eye (so good luck;-)). All I can say is to keep trying to fit each piece, if it's not perfect it's ok, there will be stitches that can cover if there are small gaps. This is how I continued the whole way up until I go to the top where I patched it with 4 equal sized (one of each color) triangles to create a round circle-patch on top. 

I used a pizza cutter to cut out the patches and simply brushed water to stick them to the the fondant layer already on the cake.

If you want to use patchwork cutters the way I did with the blue patches make sure you use the stamps before the patches dry. This is something i did not do and regretted it, as some of the pacifier did not come out properly.

Another thing I would do different next time I make a similar cake is to decorate the patches before you add the stitching. I did the reverse and I therefore have gaps and inconsistencies that I otherwise would not have... had i done it correctly.

How I decorated each "fabrik"

Blue: I used a pacifier shaped patchwork cutter to stamp a pattern on the cake.

Pink: using paste colors and water (i would use vodka next time) I hand painted little flowers with stalks (would probably skip the stalks next time for this pattern) - I will make a tutorial on how to hand pain these flowers as well. 

Green: I cut out white heart shapes sticking them to the patches evenly, then piping dots between each heart

Yellow: I hand painted these lines with a thin brush and paste color and water. Next time I would use a ruler of some sort to make the lines straighter.

I simply used royal icing to pipe the stitches, starting with the cross-stitches in the corners and then just added as many stitches as possible between them. The more detailed the more realistic :-).

Binding the flowers in my desired arrangement with the wire I then stuck them to the cake with a small patch of royal icing so that they wouldn't move and fall off while transporting it.

For once I had time to photograph.

I rarely EVER have time for this and after these photos I realize that it has made ALL the difference. Taking a picture with my kitchen from the 1930's as a backdrop will NEVER do again! And also, I really hope that I can keep this snow for a while, or more if possible... I LOOOVE the contrast! I even like the contrast of the grey of our concrete stairs leading up to our house, with the brightness of the cake. Love it.

I really hope you have gotten inspired to try a quilted cake! It's time consuming, yes. But so worth it! In spite of all the issues I see with the cake (trust me there are hundreds) I am happy with it. The response i have gotten from it has been amazing and something i never could have imagined!

Thank you guys for reading my little inspirational blog, and my personal recipe-book!

ENJOY

J.