Saving the World, One Cake at a Time

These cakes were requested of me by my cousin. She's been a babysitter to two little guys since they were born and has always gotten them a birthday cake. This year she asked me to do them. I had fun using a few new techniques that allowed me to experiment and learn.

The first cake I did was for Braydon back in January. He's a huge fan of Spiderman! I googled some Spiderman cake ideas, but didn't see anything that I liked that I could do in the time frame and budget I was working in. I remembered something I'd pinned on Pinterest a while back and decided to give it a try. The whole premise of this idea is to use a coloring book page image and layer the colors on in reverse. There's a great tutorial that explains it all and shows you with pictures every step you need to take over at Moey's Heart & Hearth. She gives wonderful instructions!
There were some hard learned lessons that I'm going to share, but first I wanted to show you the cake!

Spiderman Cake

This was the finished product! Overall I was really happy with it. The Spiderman image was a coloring book page that I found by googling. As I started to put pen to paper (or icing to wax paper in this case) I though, man this is going to be super easy! After outlining his body, I began on the webbing in his suit and quickly realized that I had a potential disaster on my hands. I was working on some monogrammed cookies for a baby shower at the same time and it was getting late on a week night. I persevered and got all of the black lines of his body drawn on. I was able to go back and fill in his red, white, and blue parts next. The red was the worst because it was so tedious to fill in each tiny square of his suit. It was like making sure the maple syrup filled up each nook and cranny of your waffle, but on a more miniscule level. Once it was finally filled in, I popped it in the freezer to harden up.
Moey gives such a wonderful tutorial over at her blog! By the time I was ready to transfer my image to the cake, it was nearing midnight. And I was tired. And I still had 40 cookies to finish after this cake. In my hurried and tired state, I took Spiderman out of my freezer, pulled the wax paper off, and attempted to flip him onto the cake. Had I taken the time to go back to the blog to read the proper steps, I would have realized that I needed to flip it to the cake while it was still on the wax paper. Ugh. Pieces ensued. He broke into about 8 pieces all together. Most of those places were either at narrow parts of him, or on a black line somewhere on him. I finally got all of his pieces on the cake and patched him up. Crisis averted. I finished up the cake with a fun web, a Spiderman logo, and the birthday boy's name and age. All in all, I was happy with the way this cake turned out and I am looking forward to using this technique again in the future! Here are some more pictures:

I think the sides of a cake go unused so often.

I love to use the side of the cake to write the recipient's name or to continue to design from the top of the cake.

I googled this image as well and just eyeballed and free handed the thing into the web on the side.

Braydon is 6!

I'm so glad they got this shot! They requested a red and blue swirled cake. What a fun surprise to cut into!

 

 The next superhero cake I did was for Braydon's brother Taz. Braydon loves Spiderman and Taz loves the Hulk! I googled to get some ideas and saw some really interesting Hulk cakes out there. I'd been searching over my lunch break for a few days and knew I had to make some decisions soon. I was going to do another reverse transfer so I was searching for some Hulk coloring pages when I came across this gem!

From: www.seecatecreate.com

 Once I saw it, I KNEW this was it! It reminded me of the Andre The Giant face:

OBEY

If you don't know who Andre The Giant is, please stop reading this blog immediately and Wikipedia him. If you DO know who he is and have seen the above image before, then YAY! I can actually remember watching him wrestle on TV as a child. And Princess Bride is such a classic.
With the Hulk cake, I ended up free handing and tweaking the design a little bit. Overall it turned out great. I had some cake issues on the inside that I was able to cover up with the icing. My black icing on this one had really large water spots in the icing. I think I must have added too much water to the icing when I was mixing it up. Lesson learned!

HULK SMASH!!!!

 

Tight squeeze on this one, but it fit!

Happy 9th Birthday Taz!