I have not written in this blog since 2009. The reason is because on October 1, 2009, Mister Pretzel Bender (TB) died. He was cakeandempire's biggest fan, and it was incredibly difficult to return without him for many, many years.
I think now, for the first time in a long time, I have felt like sharing the process for the last cake I ever made that he shared with me. It was, appropriately enough for a tragedy, an Icarus-themed cake.
I do not like the story of Icarus. It has a lot of old themes, of course, but it involves the death of a child. The death of an impetuous young adult, punished for overreaching ambition, has always seemed meanspirited to me.
Despite these troubling themes associated with Icarus, I do like the idea of representing flight and the absurdity of humans with wings. I think my reason for liking wings is that I am afraid of heights and when I was a kid, I assumed that what I was really afraid of was falling, and that if I could fly, I would no longer be afraid. I am not sure, now, that being able to fly would solve my fear of heights! I guess the plus side here is that I did draw a lot of winged figures as a kid.
Back in 2009, some company was having a t-shirt cake design contest and although I have never before or since entered such a thing, I decided to try it out. The only shirt design I liked was a kind of steampunk icarus theme, with a figure in goggles, etc, shown in flight in front of a large yellow sun. The perspective was cool of course, and I wanted to play with it immediately in cake form.
I had a concept of making a figure in front of the sun, and instead of doing it in two dimensions (like the shirt design), I wanted to try it out in three dimensions and really use the cake format to try out multiple reliefs and perspectives.
It caused me to experiment with a lot of new techniques like sugar sculpting, wafer paper, etc. Of course everything on the cake had to be edible!
My concept was to make a cake that showed a relief map of the earth from very high up (think satellites), in which Icarus would be shown in front of a globe sun that was above a cake that represented the earth.
The cake part was fairly straightforward. It was a lemon cake with lemon buttercream icing made with lots of lemon curd. The lemon cake is the white cake recipe from cook's illustrated "the best recipe" except I substituted lemon extract for the called for almond extract. It's a nice moist cake, not quite as superfine in texture as Rose Levy Beranbaum's white velvet butter cake but a bit more solid for putting things on top. I figured I needed a pretty heavy/moist cake to withstand what I wanted to put on it! I put fondant on top of the buttercream and sculpted Crete (where the Icarus story begins) and the Aegean sea (poorly it must be admitted). Note the seashells around the edge of the cake, in keeping with the Knossos theme.
After that I painted the cake using luster dust. Yes it's messier than using air-brushing or even coloring the fondant, but I like the look of it and the metallic overtones you can create. Hard to capture in photo format, but it makes it look very vivid in person.
You can see that here I cut out a circle in the fondant, and I did that so that I could make sure that the sun I planned could fit! I made a sun out of sugar hard candy, hard boil stage. I did NOT use isomalt, which is much easier to use, honestly, because I wanted this sun to look as clear as possible and isomalt does not (or it did not back then, maybe they have better products now). I flavored it lemon, in keeping with the cake flavors, and honestly it tasted pretty good! I used a greased tinfoil part of a soccer ball pan to get the globe halves done so I could piece them together with a sun corona effect.
You can see the half below.
It turned out fine after TWO tries because yes, I absolutely broke the first one putting it together. The second one I made thick enough in the central globe so that it came off of the foil without breaking. It was a valuable lesson in even candy pouring and patience.
You can see the corona effect here! The clearness of the candy, along with the rippled surface really caught the sense of constant motion that should properly represent the surface of the sun!
The next part was making Icarus himself. I used wafer paper. Now wafer paper can be used to make edible things like butterfly wings (when printed on) or bee wings, etc. you just have to slightly moisten it to stick to itself. I decided in keeping with the tradition of having everything on the cake be edible, I went with wafer paper because it had the wing texture that seemed perfect for making an Icarus figure that could actually be suspended above the cake!
I started slow by working on the wing frame and perspective.
After I finished sculpting Icarus, I had to paint him with a luster dust to achieve the look. I also put on his bag, goggles, mask, and all of the accoutrements from the original t-shirt design.
Flying perspective! Hard to initially keep all the pieces on since I had to put them on and then let it dry about one at a time. I think while I liked the wing effect here, it was more time-consuming than I realized. This happens a lot with cake decoration. Labor is not always easy to estimate with a new process.
Yes, he has a little bag. And here you can see my attempt to put on some kinds of gears on his steam punk wings, which are painted with a metallic copper to get the effect. He also has some copper joints of the wings protruding, which I though made it really look mechanical.
Finally, I put everything together on the cake. My vision was to have Icarus floating in front of the sun from a front view perspective, but from above you'd be able to see him over the Aegean. It does mean the sun is weird (because it is NOT above us at satellite distance) but I could not solve that problem without making a completely separate sun cake. I think if I did a cake like this again, I might try to make it in a tiered structure? That might get the perspective right.
Here is what this attempt showed.
Here's the view from above, where he's flying over Crete close to the sun.
Here's the view showing him in front of the sun (and both above Crete). Yes I used a hard to see flower wire to hold him up suspended from the cake.
Another overhead view from farther away.
Another view of the side cake which I think really does capture Icarus in flight in front of a sun, with Crete and the Aegean below him.
Finally, my last picture of the late Mister Preztel Bender, actually trying out the cake. He seemed to like it and I am happy that the last photo I have of him a couple of days before his death, are of him eating cake I baked. I wish he was here to have more cake baked!
It has taken me a long time to write this blog about Icarus cake, the last cake I made with him, but I am glad I finally did. I remember him for his kindness, his dry wit, his curiosity, his musicianship, and of course, his willingness to eat cake.
