Floating Crystal

Over the last year, I had narrowed the designs down to several choices. I’m an emergency veterinarian and make cakes for fun, so I needed something that I could work on in my spare time so I finally picked this one. I also really like the colors and the characters.

I traced a blown up image from my computer screen and started by making all of the characters out of fondant and gum paste (Duff brand), one main color at a time. I painted the shadowing and details with food coloring and added tiny fondant details. I also made grey diamonds out of fondant and painted them with food coloring. Painting white food coloring on top of black was frustrating since it tended to turn green.

When all of the characters were done, I made several cakes in various sizes from boxed mixes (vanilla, chocolate and red velvet), buttercream from scratch and big batch of royal icing that I dyed grey. The stacked cakes ended up being over a foot tall, so I used two cake boards and some dowels in between layers so it wouldn't implode. There is also 1 dowel through the entire thing to stabilize it, those are the only non-edible parts. I carved the cake into a basic grey monster shape and iced it with buttercream. I put some modeling chocolate over the top to get a good shape for his head and arms and then covered it with fondant.

Getting the characters to fit together with the right perspective was the biggest challenge, especially towards the bottom. Royal icing (along with some extra fondant in places) was my best friend. Starting at the top, I placed a few at a time, and let them dry with the support of toothpicks, then removed the toothpicks to add the next ones. This took me about 10 sessions to get them all on over the course of a weekend. I used more royal icing at the bottom to build up the base and was very happy with how the texture came out. It took me 30+ hours from start to finish. I took it to work for an afternoon snack. I usually find it very satisfying to cut up my cakes but this one was tough, I wanted to put it on my shelf and keep it forever. It was devoured within an hour.