Icarus

Cake-making and decorating is a hobby of mine so when I saw this context posted on boing boing I thought I might enter. I decided on the Icarus design because I liked the huge sun and the steampunk look of Icarus himself. I also thought that I could have some fun with the design and give it a perspective that included the Aegean sea complete with some of Greece (and Crete of course) visible. I figured it could approximate a globe-like look with a 12 inch two layer cake that could include all four elements, earth, fire, water, and of course air (as represented indirectly thru Icarus himself). The whole process took three solid days to complete and test every part spread over two weeks.

Most of the times when I’ve made cakes, fondant, icing, and paint have been my primary focus for decorating options. Lately though, I’ve been toying with sugar glass and I decided that making a giant sugar glass sun would be a task worthy of some effort! I don’t really have any specialty sugar tools and I don’t really like the opaque look of pulled sugar so I decided to simply experiment by making hard candy and attempting to get it to mold correctly. Easier said than done! It took about three tries to get a sugar glass sun constructed. I had purchased a cheap sport ball cake pan (the kind that make 3d ball cakes) as a mold and despite being heavily greased, the sugar stuck to it the first time. The next time I did it I put greased tinfoil on top and that proved to be a winner. However, it turns out that there’s a magical time between the cooked sugar crystallizing and it being too runny that you have to reach to get it to pour properly so that your sun surface isn’t too thin. The second attempt suffered from that problem in addition to my discovery that propane torches melt sugar glass (well, burn really) too quickly to be effective as welders. On the third try I made two batches of sugar glass one right after the other so I could use the second to weld the two mostly cooled halves of the sugar glass sun together. It was lemon flavored of course. Originally I had wanted to use the same cake ball mold to make a cake to put inside the sun, but the sugar glass structure proved too fragile to be able to really bear the cake weight (oh well, we ended up having two extra small hemispheric lemon pound cakes to eat).

The next thing I had to deal with was Icarus himself. I thought at first that I could use fondant/gum paste mixture to make him but I soon realized that it would be too heavy to suspend where I wanted him (over the Aegean) so I decided to try an edible cake decorating medium I’ve never used before: wafer paper. Actually, I have sort of used wafer paper before in that I’ve cut out butterfly designs printed on wafer paper to make realistic edible butterflies on cakes, but I’ve never tried using the wafer paper on its own. I had heard that folks have made really realistic looking wafer constructions and I figured it was worth a shot. I didn’t really have time to figure out how they did it but I figured that starch (which the paper is made of) sticks well to itself that I simply had to use a little water to glue the wafer paper to itself. It actually worked pretty well so I made first a 2d version of the steampunk Icarus before deciding that I could go for a real 3d version. I particularly like the effect of the wings, which owe their realism to the thin ethereal appearance of the paper itself. I used edible luster dust and food coloring to paint Icarus, in following the steampunk theme.

Finally, there was the main cake itself. I made two 12 inch layers from scratch using a white cake recipe that I had modified by putting in two teaspoons of lemon extract instead of the called for almond. I made a standard confectioner’s sugar buttercream and added some lemon extract and some lemon curd for a nice strong lemony flavor. Finally I covered the whole thing in commercial white fondant and sculpted some seashells around the edge of the cake. I made a model of the lower part of Greece with a few islands, a bit of Asia minor and also the island of Crete itself, over which I planned to put Icarus. The scale at which everything was constructed was not realistic in that basically I had Icarus up at the height of the Hubble telescope (more or less, about 300 miles!) rather than the much lower height birds (or mythological figures) might realistically be flying. However, I preferred that effect, and it captured the look of the globe’s eye view I was going for. The only support on the entire cake is a thin floral wire (for gumpaste flowers) that I co-opted for holding the wafer paper Icarus in position over the Aegean. The wafer paper figure was so amazingly light, it actually worked.

My friends and I are still not done eating the various large hunks of cake lying around! It came out really soft, moist, and lemony! Just the thing for really hot weather.