The Frog Piper

As luck would have it; my boyfriend's work is having a cake raffle for Relay for Life as part of their company pic-a-nic this weekend. You can imagine my reaction. I decided to try and do a few smaller-scale cakes and kill multiple birds with one stone: build up some (much needed) good karma for myself, get a couple of Threadcakes entries, hopefully get some money for a good cause, and possibly get my boyfriend an extra day of vacation (1 cake= 1 chance at vac. day).

Since so much of the decorating needs to be done close to when you need to serve it; I decided to try and get as much as possible done before hand. As luck would have it the heat and humidity took a brief break last weekend so I baked a bunch of cake and threw it in the freezer. I also made a big batch of buttercream and a batch of fondant.

For my 3rd Relay for Life cake I chose the uber-cute Frog Piper design. The cake is chocolate-raspberry with raspberry jam filling and covered in a milk chocolate ganache.

I started early in the week making the gumpaste froggies, which was a lot of fun. I also made the girl and a bunch of leaves. The frogs dried pretty well, but since the girl is so "husky" she kept slouching down. I set her to dry in a container of cornstarch, which helped somewhat. The leaves initially dried well, but then the one morning I woke up to them all melty and soft:( I decided to make some out of colored chocolate: along with the pond, lily pads, froggy tongues,and flies.

After drying a few days I painted the figures with gel color/vodka.

I filled the cake layers, and crumb-coated with chocolate buttercream, and then poured the ganache over. While the ganache was still wet I applied the pond, leaves, and flies.

I attached the frogs' tongue w/ a little bit of chocolate, and also used chocolate to glue the lily pads to the pond and the figures to the lily pads.

I really like this cake and was sad to see it go. I dropped off all the cakes at the company office this morning, the receptionist really liked them, and hopefully they'll bring in some fund-raising money as well.