Lisa's Birthday UVA Rotunda Cake. (April 2002)

Lisa is getting her Ph.D. in Anthropology at UVA, so for her birthday cake this year, I decided to bake her a cake in the shape of the Rotunda there that Thomas Jefferson designed.

Thursday, 4/11/02

Panic sets in. I'm very worried all of a sudden about my ability to complete this cake. Or at least as planned. All of the layers are baked, and I assembeled them last night. I used wooden dowels and made a 2nd tier so that it wouldn't collapse under its own weight. I also covered it in fondant. My original intention was to color some of the fondant brick red, but ultimately I decided it would be a better idea to do the whole cake in white and then paint it with food coloring, because I'd be able to get a consistent color be able to pay more attention to detail.

Now, as I look at it, I wonder how I'm ever going to be able to make it look right. I spent a couple more hours yesterday looking up some architectural details in the library.. There are certain views of the rotunda which don't seem to exist in photographs. Finally, I found what I was looking for in a book in Azzolina's library. I was pretty sure that there were 3 levels of exterior windows, but all the photographs and drawings I came across only showed two. But it turns out that there *are* three.

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Saturday Night, 4/13/02 (Lisa's Birthday).

Well, it's 20 minutes to midnight and I'm clearly not going to finish this cake tonight. I have already called Lisa to let her know that there's a cake coming, but that I got in a little bit over my head, and it may not be done in time, but that she'd definitely have it tomorrow.

Tonight I finalized the location of the windows and sketched them in pencil on the fondant. I also created the front steps and the triangular porch-roof from fondant and gumpaste. They are drying now.

That was actually one of my major holdups--this Bakel's brand gumpaste is taking forEVER to dry, so I can't assemble the pieces. I even tried baking them to see if that would speed the process along. It didn't. Don't bake gumpaste, people.

I also finalized the color of the brick: 2-3 drops super red, 1 drop chocolate brown. I painted the right side and most of the front. I'll do the windows out of royal icing tomorrow morning.

The other big thing I have to do is all the details on the dome, specifically the band of white right where the dome starts, and then the steps about halfway up the dome. I'm planning on doing those out of fondant, possibly by extruding them with a clay gun. We'll see how that works tomorrow. I can't do much else until the gumpaste and fondant dry, so I'm going to bed.

Sunday, 4/14/02

The Cake is done. Everything seemed to come together at the last minute. The parthenon was assembled sepately with gumpaste and fondant and then attached to the cake. I painted the windows a light shade of blue, as though they're refecting the sky, and then did the windows themselves out of royal icing. The triangular piece over the middle row of windows is cut out from fondant, and lined with royal. I ended up not putting the steps on the dome, partly because of the time it would have taken, and partly because I wasn't sure the best way to go about it.

I am SO glad to be done with this cake, and it turned out so much better than I'd expected, even yesterday.

Problems: Don't even get me started!