Bass Guitar

A cake so nice, it's pictured thrice!

Ben asked us several months ago if we'd consider making the groom's cake for his wedding, and we've pretty much been agonizing over the design ever since we said yes. Because of the distance, we had to bake the cakes (all nine of them) at home and then drive them to Cleveland...along with our entire bin of decorating supplies. Sheesh.

In case you can't tell from the pictures, it's life-size. Basically, we just upturned his guitar and traced it onto cardboard. We used the cutouts as stencils to carve the cake, and then slid them underneath as supports. The fondant is not homemade this time--it's a product called Fond-X, which is more expensive, but also more pliable and smooth (and still tastes great!). It was personally recommended by Kathy Wise, of Nashville's SweetWise specialty cake supply shop, and the purchase paid off in a big way.

In addition, we bought a special powder to give the guitar's body its shimmer. You mix it with vodka to make a paste, and then the alcohol evaporates, leaving a really stunning effect behind. Everything you see that's metallic is just something wrapped in aluminum foil, like gumdrops, etc. The ivory plate is white chocolate, and the knobs are Rolos we painted with black icing. My favorite parts were the final touches: strap attachments (inverted Hershey kisses), and the amp plug-in (an inverted piping nozzle).

I piped the Fender logo after much practice, but almost immediately someone at the reception smudged it. Ah well. The strings are actually strings--hence, inedible--but for pizzazz we picked up some silver embroidery floss from JoAnn's that, when twisted, looks startlingly like bass guitar strings. All the other embellishments are some manner of fondant, although the wood grain effect deserves some explanation. In fairness, the idea came from elsewhere on the internet; we first colored some icing brown, and then mixed in enough water to thin it out and create, essentially, an edible watercolor paint set. Unbelievable.