Peacock at Night

Sticking with my buttercream theme, I went for another precision piping project. Thing is, it didn't start out that way, but we'll get to that later.

I saw this design on Threadless rather late on a Friday night. I felt that I should seize the moment and got cracking (eggs, that is). I didn't have all the makings of a cake from scratch, so I grabbed a box of red velvet mix instead. I had a tub of chocolate Philadelphia, so I used that to crumb coat, and covered the whole thing in grey fondant.

Next, I printed off a copy of the design (with the colours inverted so that I wouldn't waste all my printer ink, this will be important later). I used it to mark out some reference points on the cake, and then started sketching out the lines onto the fondant with a food colouring pen. The plan was that I would go over the whole thing with black airbrush paint and a teeny tiny paintbrush, and I had started to do that when I realised something.

I was still working off the printout, which had inverted colours.

Every grey line was black, every black line was grey.

This was the point where I considered binning the whole thing. While you can "wash" food colouring off a cake with some carefully applied vodka, you're often left with discolouration, or dents in the fondant. Painting was no-longer an option, so I began considering my other options. I realised that if I very lightly washed the food colouring and piped the lines on, any discolouration would be unnoticeable. I got some chocolate buttercream and tinted it black, then got my 00 writing tip. I was able to use the faint lines of the inverted pattern as a guide, so that wasn't so bad, but there were times that the piping had to be so precise that even the tiny piping tip wouldn't work. When that happened, I had to use a needle to either clear areas, or put tiny dots down.

I eventually got all the piping done, then cut out the peacock's body in some fondant. I used a grey food colouring pen to add the markings, then put the two together.

Sadly, during the cleanup I knocked my camera off the counter and it decided that it didn't want to take pictures anymore, so I don't have the eating shot. It went down about as well as a box mix can. I'm not a fan of red velvet, but my friends never turn down free cake, so it all worked out!