I am finally starting to go back through all of my cake
photos and making blog posts about them. It is about time because this cake was
made back in January!!!
So this was made for my best friend Jasmine for her
birthday! Here is a
link to her blog - you should totally follow her if you want to make lots of awesome,
creative homemade things!
So I decided a while ago that I wanted to try and make a
high heel out fondant. Most of the heels that I had seen online had been made
out of gumpaste which I have never tried to make before. Although I would like
to make it one day I much prefer working with
Marshmallow Fondant and wanted to
try and make it out of that even though I knew that it would be a lot trickier
to stay totally hard. So, here are the steps I took to make the shoe:
My idea for the shoe was a red shoe with gold glitter on top
because Jasmine had previously glittered some of her shoes before so I knew
that she liked that effect. My glitter didn’t work out as well as I had hoped
and the effect turned out to be more like lustre dust on it.
One site I would highly recommend for tips and advice on
making gumpaste shoes with lots of examples in case you don’t know what time of
shoe you are going to do would be
this site by sugarteachers.blogspot.co.uk.
I would recommend making the heel first. This gives it time
to hard up so once you put the sole on top it doesn’t fall. Remember and stick
a dowel, or depending how tall the heel is, a cocktail stick so that you can
stick the heel onto a polystyrene stand and the sole can have something to
stick onto.
I ended up using a flat shoe
for the template- size 6- and using the same method as the
trainer shoe cake. I
drew around the shoe and then cut a bit of cardboard out for the template. Using
the cardboard template again for a guide you are going to want to cute the same
shape out but with about 1cm off the edge so you get the inner sole- I used a
light pink for mine. This can be stuck on the main sole with edible glue or
even a little bit of water. As you can see in the 2
nd photo I put
something underneath the heel because I wanted to support it. This was a 2litre
bottle I believe that I cut a section out of so it would stay round and then
got the size right so that it could fit under the shoe.
This was the finished
shoe just drying off and ready to be put on the cake! I based my design on one
that I had seen on the sugar teacher’s site and I think that it didn’t turn out
too bad. The heel of the shoe was made purely with trial and error- figuring
how tall I wanted the back to be and then tapering this down until it met with
the sole of the shoe. The front was done in pretty much the same way- getting a
rough idea how much to put on the shoe and cutting it down until I got it to a shape
that I wanted. When I put the front bit on I left it to harden up by rolling up
some kitchen roll and putting it under to that the shape would stay ‘up’ and it
worked for me!
I wanted it to say Vivienne Westwood just because that is
one of Jasmine’s favourite designers! And the red stripe on the front of the
shoe was made by painting on red food colouring with a little bit of vodka.
The cake that I had actually made was a beetroot and
pistachio cake and this was definitely not my choice! I was not best impressed
that I would be making a cake with beetroot but actually I had to swallow my
words because tasting the batter before it even went in the oven was so
fabulous! And look at that colour! >>>>>
The cake did not turn out that bright after being in the
oven but the taste was still so fine and with the pistachios it was gorgeous! I
ended up just adapting a carrot cake recipe that I liked- substituting the
beetroot instead of carrot obviously and adding in chopped pistachios. I would
definitely recommend using beetroot in cakes!
I did add other things onto the cake: It was supposed to be
a shoebox cake but next time I will work on it to make it more like a shoebox! And
I also added in some make up, nail polish, ‘tacky’ rings and some pearls to
make it more girly!
Valentine's Cupcakes!
