Sunday, August 31, 2003

Lisa's Birthday, Punu Mask Cake. (August 2003)



Happy Birthday, Lisa!

Lisa and her husband spent the last year in Gabon, Africa. They got back to the U.S. earlier today, and rather than just bake the cake back in April (her real birthday) and show her a photograph on the web, I thought I'd wait until they got back and give her a cake in person. Last year's cake, architectural masterpiece that it was, gave me a lot to live up to. To be honest though, I didn't even try. I've known for a while what I wanted to do for this cake, since it would have to serve double duty as a belated birthday cake and a welcome-home cake.

The cake is based on a punu mask (see the last photo to see the cake and the mask that inspired it side-by-side), which has special significance for various reasons. As recently as yesterday afternoon, I still wasn't sure exactly how I was going to pull it off, though. I used a yellow cake, baked in two parts: the base is just a 10" square cake that I actually had in the freezer. (This is the first time I've frozen a cake--about a month ago--and decorated it later. Steve at Fantes said he's successfully frozen a cake for two months, so I figured this one would work fine. And it did) The mask itself was baked in a one of the glass bowls that Dan got me from William Sonoma.

I frosted the base plain white so it wouldn't detract at all from the mask, and I piped a plain shell border around the bottom. Then I put the dome cake on top of that. The mask itself was covered with rolled fondant, which I dyed with a couple drops of ivory food coloring so it would stand out from the white background. I sliced two pieces off of the dome to form the cheek bones. These pieces became the middle piece of hair. I cut various other pieces of cake from the scraps that were left after leveling both cakes. These became the sides of the hair, the eyes, nose, and lips. YOu can see the stages I went through in the 2nd image below. Next I rolled out the ivory fondant, laid it across the dome, and cut off the excess with a sharp knife. Then I gently molded the fondant around the pieces underneath that formed the details of the face.

I used a metal shaping tool gently form the slits in the eyes and the grooves in the hair. I stress the word "gently" because I had to be careful to get the indentations into the fondant without actually poking holes in it. When I was satisfied with the face, I mixed some food coloring (brown, red, burgundy, and black) and painted the appropriate portions of the fondant. The straw tassles at the bottom of the mask are also fondant, dyed lemon yellow and ivory, and formed with a clay gun. I poked holes in the mask with a wooded dowel and then stuck the tassles inside.

Problems: I had amazingly few problems with this cake. It really all came together at the last minute.