Mourning

I used to LOVE to watch Bob Ross and his painting show when I was a kid. Something about his soothing voice and the sound of the brush on the canvas as he painted happy little trees was hypnotizing. When I saw this design I knew immediately it was the one for me to do this year. The cakes I usually make are for paying customers, so naturally my family was thrilled that they would get to eat a cake this time, instead of just scraps (although they ate those too!). Since it's fall, I decided to experiment and bake an apple cider cake, and fill/ice it with some salted caramel buttercream. Because of the large head and little body, I used a threaded rod as the main support and made the body out of rice krispy treats for added support underneath. I then went about stacking and filling cakes with the smaller one underneath and set about to carving it down to try to get the general shape, using extra icing to fill in areas that needed to be more "poofy" and covering/decorating the entire cake with fondant. I did use some craft wire for the arms so that they could hold the weight of the tree, which was also made entirely of fondant and as a result was a tad heavy. I rolled out individual fondant ropes to make the curls on his head and used color dust to add some shading to his "frown lines" to make them stand out. When I finished the cake, my boys complained that the white tears I left on there looked like he was crying milk and suggested I make them blue instead. I thought all blue tears would look weird, so I decided to add a little blue shading and I think it did a lot to give them a little more dimension, and look less like milk tears. : ) It took me about 5 hours from assembling the structure to finishing the decorating. I'm really happy with how he came out and had a blast building/decorating this cake.