God Save the Villain

I choose "God Save the Villain" because I knew it would be a challenge. I have never carved a face or head out of cake. I do have a little bit of experience decorating cake, I've been teaching myself how make and decorate cakes and make fondant over the last few years. So I didn't just want to take a simple design that I knew I could pull off easily, I really wanted a challenge and boy, did I get one.

Because the design was so complex, I decided on a simple white cake but added a significant amount of cinnamon. Cinnamon is probably my all time favorite ingredient. I made 5 10" round cakes (from scratch) as well as 6 jumbo cupcakes. The baking took a long time because I have a pretty small oven, and I also only had two 10" cake pans, so I had to make several batches.

I let the cakes set up overnight in the freezer because I knew I had a lot of carving the next day and I wanted them to be nice and stiff so I didn't have a lot of crumbling from carving the cake.
After I carved it I covered it in a simple vanilla butter cream and let it set up in the fridge.

The day prior I had made a large batch of fondant from scratch. I put a few "features" on the face with some left over fondant before rolling out the rest of the fondant and putting it over the whole head. Once the fondant was on I let it sit in the fridge for awhile to rest.

I made the hair, crown, and earrings all out of gumpaste. The hair took an exceptionally long time to create, I made each wave and curl of hair individually. Once the hair and crown were in place, I painted them with gel paste food coloring and vodka.
For the lines on the hair I drew those on with an edible food writer pen (which ran out of "ink" so I ended up dipping it in a mixture of gel paste and vodka for each line I drew-again very time consuming). I then started on the face. I drew each wrinkle and blemish on with an edible food writer which I smeared with my fingers afterwards to make it look more realistic and I also didn't want a white face with black lines, I wanted it to look more like the t-shirt, where she has a bit more of a grey face.

I painted the lips and smear on the face, again with gel paste and vodka, as well as the black eye sockets. I saved the eyes for last because I knew they'd be the hardest. They were... I drew them on a piece of white gumpaste with the edible food writer (several times before getting it just right) then cut them out and stuck them on.

I added my own little touch to the crown, I didn't make it exactly like the t-shirt design but I think that's the point. That's also why I decided to add the cupcake with red frosting and a bite taken from it. My initial reaction to this t-shirt was that of a child with icing all over their face. Although I do realize this is the Joker's face from Batman, I got a kick out of the idea and ran with it.

It's like "God Save the Villain... was hungry" that's my version anyway.

Overall the cake took me five days to complete (that's mixed in with working a full time job) so by the end it actually tasted pretty stale. I did manage a few bites from the pieces I had carved when doing the face and it WAS a delicious cake!

It was a great learning experience for me and although it took me a long time to create I really enjoyed every minute of it!