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 2nd 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!