Celestial Cephalopod

I chose this design not only because it's just AWESOME!!!, but also to challenge myself to make a spherical cake that also allowed me to work on sculpting and painting skills. My intent was to make the cake in concentric layers and make it a free-standing sphere without internal support. This was a challenge for me because it meant going out of my comfort zone of making cakes with a less dense and much more moist cake recipe to using recipes that could support their own density without sagging. While I was able to achieve the free-standing sphere, the concentric ring layers will require a bit more practice. The project took about 12 hours, but there may have been a few breaks in there for football game viewing, grocery store runs, and coffee fill-ups. I started with a chocolate mud cake for the central core, a coconut amaretto spongecake central layer, and a vanilla madeira cake for the outer layer. Crumb-coated the whole thing in vanilla buttercream, and then marshmallow fondant which I then hand painted. The cephalopod was done with chocolate mud cake covered with 50/50 mix of fondant and modelling chocolate. I am very pleased with my creation and it was DELICIOUS!