Icarus Cake In Memoriam TB

 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. 

Tzompantli Cake

The Tzompantli cake is a follow-up cake of sorts to the Chacmool cake. It was made for friend M for her birthday and the subject matter is due to her interests in things related to bone and archaeology. It was a bit of challenge for me because I really don’t know all that much about bone anatomy. I mean, I like sculpting people (mostly their heads) but I can’t say I have much understanding of what goes underneath. This is doubtless a serious weakness as knowing the underlying anatomy is supposed to help make one a better artist! Oh well. First off, I’d better tell you what a tzompantli actually is supposed to represent.

A tzompantli means “wall/rack of skulls” (more or less) in Classical Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. A skull rack is a place where skulls are placed in a rack and unlike the medieval European tradition of bone curation, mostly these skulls are from sacrificial victims or fallen enemy warriors. These were presumably displayed at public places near public buildings and edifices. At least, that appears to be the idea.

Of course, bone curation was also practiced for family members too, so it’s not like it was just limited to “trophy” skulls but in the case of the rack, it seems that those who occupied it were enemies or captives. So, basically, a tzompantli is another version of a public human sacrifice/warfare memorial, except presumably some of the skulls could have been captured in battle as well as removed under more ceremonial circumstances like a ballgame. So making a tzompantli cake makes a nice addition to my cake repertoire of Mesoamerican human sacrifice monuments.

Honestly, I can’t recall that many skulls have been found in archaeologically recovered contexts with the correct lobes removed or holes for placement in racks, so this may have been a practice that was somewhat more limited or specialized than what the conquistador Bernal del Castillo suggests (his numbers are very high). At this point, it is something that is difficult to know.

However, we do know that they are represented in some of the codices as almost abacus-like structures with skulls as the beads. Most of these post-date the Spanish Conquest so it really is hard to know whether they are all that accurate. We have to just go with what we have for now.

To do my tzompantli cake I had to make some structural decisions. Did I want skull shaped cakes that I could stack together as a rack or did I want to make a regular old cake and merely decorate it with skulls made from fondant? This time, I decided to stick to doing the cake with fondant skulls. For one thing, although I had plastic skull molds for making sugar skulls for the Day of the Dead, I didn't actually have any mold that could withstand oven temperatures. I did see some skull pans once but the details on them were woefully inadequate. Friend M has actually taken quite a bit of bone anatomy and would have doubtless been disappointed with them!

As I’ve said earlier, I wasn’t that good at molding the skulls. As you can see below they really ended up resembling gorilla skulls. Well, sort of…put it this way, had you opted for a statistical shape analysis of my fondant skulls you would have concluded that the individuals in question suffered from all sorts of rare and unusual maladies. You might also have concluded that they were evidence of a now extinct race of polar space gorillas. You know, I did once have access to a 3d scanner, perhaps it would be a fun exercise for next time!

The good thing about doing a skull rack for a friend is that you can also render their head alongside all the other “victims”. In this case I thought it would be better if I did a head with flesh still on it, so it would be recognizably hers. As you can see, it does sort of look like a human head, perhaps a bit too much of a Barbie-like expression but then, I don’t actually know what decapitated fresh heads look like much less what type of expressions are common so it could be just right. I opted to sculpt the head and the features entirely of different colors of fondant rather than paint the features onto the head. I thought painting on the fondant, while it would produce a more realistic head, might make the monochromatic white fondant skulls appear a little to different and fake-looking by comparison. I suppose I was going for more of a "fake" fun style in this case rather than gorey. Perhaps next time I'll go for horribly accurate.

Finally, I attempted to use lollipop sticks to make the requisite “rack” for the skulls. Believe it or not, it did actually stay up but the big problem I found was that the skulls kept spinning and staying at awkward angles more suggestive of a child’s toy or a really macabre abacus rather than a real skull rack.

This is where some more details on skull rack practice would have helped. It’s possible that they used a method other than the simple obvious method of "impale the skulls with a stick and put on rack"…they may have been attached by other means or secured by some other device to the stick. Or it could be that my skulls (being solid and ill-proportioned) were so “off” in their measurements and weight that they simply didn’t behave like real skulls would. I suspect that it’s a combination of the two, I don’t know how the rack worked and I messed up the skull proportions. It would be easy to find out with real skulls but I had cake to finish making. Besides, I don’t have access to labs where they work with skulls at my university and I suspect that they would look askance at anything that might require er, drilling holes into them to see how I could hang them on a rack! But it would be a nice side research project for the history/discovery channel types. I hope they get right on that.

Finally, I just laid the rack directly onto the cake surface so that all the skulls (and fleshed head) were laying in the correct manner. The cake was basically a simple and yummy platform for the actual skull rack. It was a golden buttercream cake with a simple american style confectioner's sugar buttercream (arizona is too hot generally to use any other kind without some access to near constant refrigeration). You can see the happy result below.

Naturally, everyone got their own skull.

Establishing a Painting Tradition

I’ve never been that much of a painter. My watercolors were really terrible as a kid and I haven’t really tried them since I was twelve. In retrospect I was too impatient as a kid to let layers dry and although some of them started out well, they invariably ended rather badly with lots of unintended purple brown streaks. The one exception I can think of is when I used watercolor merely as a fill-in color to some pencil drawing I’d done and it turned out okay. It was the “medieval illuminated manuscript” birthday card I’d done for my father (I have a whole manuscript/ancient document tradition for his birthday). Actually, I believe my stepmother H “corrected” that one as I always have trouble staying between the lines. Even my own! The one attempted painting I did with oil (well I was nine and my mother had optimistically gotten me some paint by number thing) was something appalling. Actually, I ignored the numbers carefully labeling the under-drawing on the canvas type board and painted a few people (it was supposed to be a landscape). My mother never purchased one of those again.

Having recited that dismal history of my non-illustrious painting past, I do love to draw. I’ve drawn pencil sketches and attempted a few charcoal drawings and lots of pastels, crayons, pens, magic markers, and even sharpies. Mostly what I’ve tended to draw are people. Okay, when I was really little I drew ballet dancers and then I went thru a horses phase although the only part of the horse I was good at was the head. Actually, mostly the part of people that I can sketch with any decency at all is the head up to the shoulders; after that, things get a bit sketchy. Occasionally hopeful friends and family members have purchased various books on anatomy and the human form in the hopes that I will get better at drawing the entire human body. I usually read the books avidly and then still find myself quite unable to draw them. I think it’s because that’s not the part of people that interests me most. It’s not that I don’t admire beautiful body proportions. In fact, I love three dimensional figural sculptures but somehow I just haven’t gotten the hang of it producing it in drawing form. My first impulse doodle is a face, often in profile, and then the face head-on and I’m typically obsessed with hair, which never gets drawn realistically enough for me.

In addition to people I also like sketching flowers and mostly I stick to those subjects. Although once I was required to draw dozens of different types of squirrels using crayons. Perhaps one day I will attempt a squirrel sketch on a cake but only if it’s for friend T, who might appreciate a rodent portrait on his cake!

One thing all of my drawings seem to have in common is that they are messy. The nice interpretation is that they are more evocative of the subject rather than attempting something like a hyper realistic Audubon print.

Of course, cakes are not typically the medium in which one sketches or watercolors, one either does or does not have designs on the surface! The cakes as ceramics turned out okay because the kind of ceramics I was attempting happened to be fairly “messy” themselves so that despite the repetitiveness of the designs, the occasional slip-ups were a little less obvious. I have attempted drawings of flowers on cakes before, such as the poppies in a previous cake, but in that case I was directly painting the wet food coloring on the cake without diluting it with vodka and letting it dry in layers (like water colors) or by mixing the colors themselves as one would in an oil painting. In a sense, these simpler brushed designs can be considered a trial run for the more complicated techniques and designs that I attempted here.

All of my recent attempts involved flowers, which I am relatively comfortable sketching but uncertain at producing exact lines! My first attempt was cherry blossoms and a baby sparrow on a birthday cake for friend R. I picked cherry blossoms for him because I figured he’d like them and they seemed similar in visual effect to other much tinier flowers I’d seen him admire.
Besides, I also have good memories of visiting the cherry blossoms that were originally a gift to the US from Japan in the tidal basin in the DC area with my Japanese grandmother, who was also fond of them and liked the back-story.

I decided to include a fledgling swallow because I had the pleasure of watching four little eggs grow from naked hatchlings to finally fledging on the porch of the laboratory I was staying in this past summer. It was a real treat! And they were really adorably cute, as you can see below.

Here they are as hatchlings.


Here they are as fledglings having just fledged!



So how to put the sketches on the cake? I decided to stick to a familiar method using the same luster dust I’d used in previous cakes and simply use a little bit of vodka as a thinner and paint directly onto the fondant as if it were a canvas. Using just luster dust vodka paint, I knew I could achieve a painted design that would dry.

Here are two overviews of R’s cake:

A detail:

For R’s cake I used all metallic luster powders so in person they all gleamed like matte glittery metal. The effect is, alas, not really apparent in the photos I took. It was a devil’s food cake.

The next attempt was for friend D. I’ve made ceramic style cakes for her before but this time I wanted to do a flower painting so I asked her which one she liked best. In this case she came up with an answer, the Mexican bird of paradise. Actually, what she really said was, “I don’t know; whatever it is that’s blooming right now, I like those flowers.”

It seemed kind of hard to draw because leaves are fern-like, but I gave it a go here, using different shades of green to try and get a more realistic feel to the leaves. I can’t say that I succeeded at much more than “evocative” here because, frankly, I’ve had so little practice or mentoring. I definitely need more practice, but it was fun at least getting something that wasn’t embarrassing at least! I had help from friend L, whose hand is barely visible in the picture, in getting the colors a little more right.

Also, this cake design really was more like a watercolor/oil painting because I had to mix shades and overpaint, which I hadn’t really done very much with the cherry blossoms. The flowers came out a bit better than the leaves did in my opinion, probably because I’ve had more practice at sketching flower forms and they’re really the part of the flower that I pay the most attention to anyways. This was actually fun to do and I also used non luster colors so the results were very bright, which is a nice effect! You can see Mr. PB stealing some extra fondant on the side…

D’s cake was a pound cake vanilla number I think she’s liked in past years, a golden buttercream cake.

Finally, although this wasn’t really a painted sketch, I did actually attempt a combination of 3d and painted effects in a really large birthday cake I did for another friend. Friend RK likes purple so I decided to try my hand at purple gumpaste orchids accented with painted stems and decorative accents that were all painted in the same fashion as the previous flowered cakes. I liked the effect of combining the two methods, but I think there are ways I could be more sophisticated about it. That’s really the fun part about making these cakes, with all of them, there’s always a lot of room for improvement and each one contributes something to the next.

As an aside, I also realized one shouldn’t experiment with a new type of gumpaste that seemed nicer to model but unfortunately far too delicate when dried. I lost about half of the flowers I constructed originally because they were so fragile they broke when I was assembling them in the final stage.

This last cake was red velvet. It's a quintessentially Southern cake, so I've been exposed to it at church potlucks and social events for as long as I can remember. Someday I will devote an entire blog to the subject of red velvet cake. However, my feelings about its origins and its curious sour and sweet flavor are far too complicated to summarize easily, much like my feelings about my birthplace!

Personally, one thing I feel unequivocally positive about is its color, which is magnificently visible below.

Calendar Stone Cake

I’ve always wanted to do a cake of the Calendar stone, which is actually the sacrificial stone of Motecuhzoma II, one of the last rulers of the Aztec Triple Alliance empire.

This cake is the latest in a string of Mesoamerican monument cakes undertaken here at Cake and Empire. It is also one of my most ambitious to date. Partly this is because the details are extremely unforgiving and there are many different levels of relief to evoke, as the image below can attest!

The stone itself is huge, spanning about 12 meters across. The skill of execution alone is breathtaking. The demonstration of obvious technical prowess combined with many levels of relief carving and a complex design but eye-pleasing design make it one of the most beautiful of the Aztec monuments. It was originally uncovered in the late 18th century in Mexico City (1790) which was built on top of the prehispanic capital of Tenochtitlan. It has been dubbed the Calendar stone because it depicts dates, including the twenty day month signs and the four previous “suns” or universes in the Aztec mythological cycle as represented by earth (jaguar), air, water, and fire. The present age is the fifth sun and is shown emerging from the underworld in the center of the stone.

According to the experts (in my case, Emily Umberger) the stone was probably painted but many mold castings later, the paint is only supposition, though based on known historical examples of painted monuments. She’s seen the stone up close and in person so she told me many details about it that I wouldn’t otherwise have known. For example, there is damage on the central part of the stone on the central “sun face” that isn’t due to taphonomic processes but rather to use wear most likely related to human sacrifice.

I attempted to portray the wear patterns in the cake design itself, as you can see below.

To those of raised in more antiseptic religious traditions that employ grape juice rather than real blood, use wear from religious sacrifice is a little unsettling. As a kid I used to wonder if real sacrifice rather than metaphoric made it more powerful or whether it would become routine like Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. At any rate, we can be certain that it meant something significant to those who built and used these stones.

Of course, everything that is known about the stone and its original creators is complicated. Even the use of the term Aztec is fraught in academic circles, most people who use it now seem to have to engage in a lengthy aside as to what, precisely, they mean by it. Wiki has a decent entry here on the Aztecs that includes a bibliography for the interested reader.

Aside from the complex set of contexts and information attached to this monument in prehispanic times, and which remain rather obscure to me, its importance in modern Mexico interests me as well. It’s the most ubiquitous image of ancient Mexico and it is plastered on almost everything in modern Mexico as well. The Calendar stone really is used to as a representation of modern Mexico, it’s almost like a flag but better. Whatever its older meanings and usages, it has come to represent modern Mexico in a way that appears to crosscut any regional or ethnic identity. I think that is really what attracted me to attempting a cake representation.

I decided to make the scale one inch equals one meter, given the level of details in the piece. I used my favorite commercially available fondant, fondx to sculpt the different details. I did it piecemeal using the shapes of the glyphs to mold each piece separately to the right scale, figuring I could put them all together on the finished cake.

This time I wasn’t really able to make much use of any template cutouts from Emily’s drawing; instead, I had to really just use them as a sculpting guide because the level of relief and detail was too great. I think it *might* have helped if I’d been better able to recognize each of the representations of the iconographic items used. For example, the deer in the day month glyph boxes looked rather dog-like to me, so I just directly imitated what I saw from the drawing and picture rather than what I thought a deer should look like. My understanding from others with much more experience in epigraphy is that it is better to be completely familiar with the visual corpus prior to attempting what I did. Oh well.

The project turned out to be an incredibly labor intensive task, taking a total of 12 hours to finish sculpting each piece to the correct scale. Of course, it’s the most fun I’ve had with fondant in a while and it’s also the most elaborately constructed cake I’ve ever made for just me rather than for friends. I wasn’t as exacting as I could have been; there is definitely room for improvement on a future version!

For example, I left off the nemontoni (the unlucky extra days from a solar year) that were represented as glyphs right around the main sun face. I was tired at that point and I figured the missing tiny dots would go unnoticed (I figured incorrectly as it turns out). I also left out the bells that adorn the serpent figureheads that encircle the edge of the stone that probably represent the watery underworld (and would therefore perhaps have been painted turquoise). Funnily enough, no one noticed the missing bells. I think this is because the level of dimensional detail was sufficiently daunting that the eye overlooks it while the nemontoni really stood out on their own despite their tininess. Of course, I’d rather get every obsessive detail in, but I think in truth it would be slightly different each time I attempted it.

This time I felt a minor twinge while cutting the cake, almost as if I should have performed some other ceremony prior to its destruction and enjoyment. Something about the formality and obvious excessive labor of the cake combined with a group of people just standing around waiting to eat it may have lent to my wanting something more for a brief moment!

Cakes and Miniatures

This is a blog about cakes and miniatures.

My step-mother, H, also collects dolls and, more importantly, doll accoutrements. In particular, she collects “playscale” doll stuff (aka, the right size for Barbie) rather than the itsy bitsy miniatures that used to fascinate me as a kid in doll museums. Due to her interest in doll stuff, and her own interest in sculpting doll food she persuaded me to attempt making a miniature replica of a wedding cake I’d recently made. Most of the cakes I’ve done required a certain amount of sculpting so despite my relative inexperience in that art in a non-food medium, I decided to give it a whirl.

H helpfully got me a book on polymer clays and more importantly, she got me some basic tools and clays to get started. Basically, tinfoil can be used as an armature by making tinfoil base "cakes" and then one can treat the clay exactly like fondant and use it to cover and decorate the faux cake.

The first cake I attempted was a version of the art deco and paisley wedding cake sans the paisley elements because I thought they might be too ambitious in something this small. First I made the tinfoil "cakes" and covered them with clay. H helped me roll out the clay and make the tiny round ball borders.

Next I stacked the finished tiers together and added the detail work.

The next step was making the black and white lotuses. It was actually a lot easier sculpting polymer clay even though the scale was challenging because I found it to be a lot less sticky than fondant!

After that I had to make some choices. Although I really liked the original cake topper deco line drawing in royal icing on the wedding cake, I didn't think I could get it to look right at this small a scale. The contrast between the deco lotuses and the teensy line drawing would be significant. I thought something bolder would show up better so I opted for a different design. H can be shown holding her cake just prior to baking so you can get a nice visual sense of playscale.

My dad helped out by making the cake platform. It was a real family affair.

Finally, the finished and baked cake.

And the original wedding cake below for comparison!



The next miniature I attempted was one of Mr PB's favorites, the daisy cake as seen previously here.

First I added the stems. Then the flowers, color by color.

I couldn't manage the same level of details in the flowers for the miniature cake as I did for the original. The mini-cake was truly too mini.

Finally the finished cake.

The original real cake is below:

And here's the finished clay cake with a better scale, since I muffed the one with the measuring tape.

Finally, I made a miniature of a birthday cake I made for Mr. Pretzel Bender.

Here's Mr. PB's original cake. It was devil's food (what else?) covered in fondant and painted with a metallic blue luster dust with silver fondant damask-pattern like accents.

And the miniature cake below!

I have mixed feelings about making miniature cake replicas. They don't smell good (polymer clay smells like playdoh but saltier), they don't taste good er...can't be eaten.

I enjoyed the experiment, and will probably make more of these for H, but I think I prefer real cake because they can be enjoyed and then finished.

They don't last; I like that.