What a Beautiful Mess I'm In - Part One

The Daring Kitchen, in conjunction with the U.S. Confection Connection, is offering one lucky person the chance to attend the New York Cake Convention.The catch? Well, you just have to be the grand prize winner of their cake decorating contest. The rules? You have a single 9" cake (square or round) that you can decorate based on what Autumn means to you. Wow, that seems pretty simple, but to be quite honest, I didn't think I had what it took to really compete in this competition. I have 3 Wilton Cake Decorating classes under my belt, but is that going to be enough to WOW these judges?

When I finally decided to enter the contest, I hit a wall: what's something that represents what the fall season means to me and is different and creative? I tossed around a bunch of ideas with BF when it finally dawned on me to make a mooncake. Yeah, a mooncake. Ok, here comes another wall: how do I actually go about making a 9" mooncake?

I decided to document all my triumphs and failures on this blog knowing others are probably going to think I'm a crazy for doing all of this. But hey, I don't have a job or any kids and have the free time to do it, so I did.

Here's my first attempt: Mooncake Prototype

This 6" prototype was just to see if I could actually make a cake that looked like a mooncake. As you can see, it is possible. The next reason I did a prototype was to test out how to get the designs onto the cake. I tried laying out the designs onto the bare cake and then covering it with the fondant, but the fondant was too heavy and covered everything. I then tried scoring the fondant, but the designs just melted away. I decided I'll just have to put the designs on top of the fondant and blend them into it to create the "mold-like" feature in real mooncakes. Next problem to solve was how to get the correct coloring of a mooncake. I glazed the fondant with sugar water and tried torching it with my creme brulee torch, but it just melted the fondant instead. So I sprinkled some sugar directly onto the fondant and torched away. It turned out somewhat well for a first try, but dad-in-law drove me to challenge myself more to make the cake look EXACTLY like a real mooncake. Alright, attempt #2 here I come.

I like how it's named "BERNZ O MATIC"