3D
Honey Moon
by Meg Huebner @meg · submitted Aug 17, 2010 · 2010 contest
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Description
I picked the design "Honey Moon" because, well, I love puns. It also looked like it would be an interesting challenge to take a 2-dimensional design depicting lots of texture and depth and turn it into a 3-dimensional object.
The whole project took about 3 days to complete. Everything is completely edible; there were no support structures used. Here's how I made it:
I started with a gluten-free chocolate cake mix from Betty Crocker. Ordinarily I bake from scratch, but I started this only a few days before the deadline, and I wanted to make sure nothing could go wrong with the recipe! I used 1 and 1/2 boxes - one for the round base, and half of the other box for the moon part. I made the moon rounded by baking it in a glass bowl.
I levelled the top of the base layer and the under-side of the moon (which provided me with yummy cake scraps to nibble whilst working!) and arranged them. I tied a strip of fondant around the base of the moon to keep things in place - this made the cake look like a hat for a little while! - and worked on frosting the background with homemade buttercream. To get the buttercream black enough, I used a combination of cocoa powder, coffee, and food colouring. It took a long time to get it nice and shiny.
The moon itself took a lot of steps, and patience. First I laid a layer of yellow fondant over it. Then I rolled out some more fondant and made it orange. From the orange piece I cut out all the honeycomb shapes with a knife.
With the honeycomb lattice on the moon, I then began "painting" the moon with various mixtures of sugar, food colouring, molasses, and homemade buttercream frosting to get the shading right. I also made the syrup for the honey drips - it even has real honey in it! (The combination of fondant, molasses, and honey may seem odd, but it actually made the moon taste like candy corn, yum.)
After glazing the moon and making the honey drips, I added more "paint" to the honey to replicate the shading on the shirt design.
The astronauts, along with the shuttle and Earth, are made of fondant; the bees are marzipan with fondant wings. (The bees and astronauts were really fun to make. It reminded me of working with modelling clay.) I painted the details onto them with thinned buttercream and sugar. The final touches, the stars, are made from melted white chocolate.
The end result turned out to be a very yummy mixture of many different flavours: chocolate cake with the coffee-chocolate frosting (and touches of white chocolate), the syrupy honey and fondant moon, and marzipan. Also, there's something oddly satisfying about demolishing something I spent hours and hours working on - I think it made it even more delicious, to know I was finally done!
The whole project took about 3 days to complete. Everything is completely edible; there were no support structures used. Here's how I made it:
I started with a gluten-free chocolate cake mix from Betty Crocker. Ordinarily I bake from scratch, but I started this only a few days before the deadline, and I wanted to make sure nothing could go wrong with the recipe! I used 1 and 1/2 boxes - one for the round base, and half of the other box for the moon part. I made the moon rounded by baking it in a glass bowl.
I levelled the top of the base layer and the under-side of the moon (which provided me with yummy cake scraps to nibble whilst working!) and arranged them. I tied a strip of fondant around the base of the moon to keep things in place - this made the cake look like a hat for a little while! - and worked on frosting the background with homemade buttercream. To get the buttercream black enough, I used a combination of cocoa powder, coffee, and food colouring. It took a long time to get it nice and shiny.
The moon itself took a lot of steps, and patience. First I laid a layer of yellow fondant over it. Then I rolled out some more fondant and made it orange. From the orange piece I cut out all the honeycomb shapes with a knife.
With the honeycomb lattice on the moon, I then began "painting" the moon with various mixtures of sugar, food colouring, molasses, and homemade buttercream frosting to get the shading right. I also made the syrup for the honey drips - it even has real honey in it! (The combination of fondant, molasses, and honey may seem odd, but it actually made the moon taste like candy corn, yum.)
After glazing the moon and making the honey drips, I added more "paint" to the honey to replicate the shading on the shirt design.
The astronauts, along with the shuttle and Earth, are made of fondant; the bees are marzipan with fondant wings. (The bees and astronauts were really fun to make. It reminded me of working with modelling clay.) I painted the details onto them with thinned buttercream and sugar. The final touches, the stars, are made from melted white chocolate.
The end result turned out to be a very yummy mixture of many different flavours: chocolate cake with the coffee-chocolate frosting (and touches of white chocolate), the syrupy honey and fondant moon, and marzipan. Also, there's something oddly satisfying about demolishing something I spent hours and hours working on - I think it made it even more delicious, to know I was finally done!