HiveComb

Aaaaahahahahahaha, so we definitely had more fun decorating the cake than we did baking it! That's for sure!

A good couple of learning curves here too though.... eeek?

So pro-tip, when adding gel food colouring to your icing, "chill your biscuit" lol. No, really, I was like, " Hey, this icing doesn't even look blue enough," and kept adding more and more food colouring gel until I realised I was squeezing the last bits out of what was a full bottle at the start.

Colouring batter is NOT the same as colouring icing. Which, in contrast to the icing, looked fine when I mixed it, but ended up just a bit too dark. I was going for midnight blue and ended up with an almost blue-black:

Amusingly enough, though, it did make it REALLY easy to detect any cake-pinchers as anyone who went near it looked like they had eaten a Smurf!😂😆😜😱

So, back to chilling biscuits or cakes or whatever, when mixing food colouring gel into your icing, give the colour a chance to develop. Once I had given up (and thank GOD I did) and run out of food colouring, I put the icing into the fridge. And low and behold, I swear every hour, the colour changed! Before I knew it, I had a GORGEOUS midnight blue - which could have been achieved with a fraction of the heartache and food colouring gel!😂🤦

lesson learnt.

So,

Back to the beginning, I struggled with this cake, especially in 💙🤦‍♀️Claire's Crazy Cakes and Bakes Chapter 98 - Aime's Birthday Cake Part 2 - A Series of Unfortunate Events💙🤦‍♀️.

But as I said, the icing and decorating were far more fun. After recently being gifted some wonderful baking tools, including a silicone piping bag (which is AWESOME) I even learned some new piping tricks! These just weren't possible for me before as I really struggled with my piping gun and disposable plastic piping bags.

Before I even started baking the cake, I had already started a production line of white chocolate stars and hearts, as they were going to be the stars of the show, lol, after the absolutely BEAUTIFUL rice paper print that I designed together with my extremely talented graphic designer bestie.

The stars and hearts were actually the easiest thing to make out of the whole cake, and the white chocolate didn't even require me to stand over a stove, which I can't do at the moment anyway, unfortunately, due to knee and back pain being unbearable of late.

I was able to fill a pot with boiling water, put the white chocolate shards into a heat-safe jug, and it melted all on its own! This also prevented me from burning the chocolate, which I have done before, and there is no going back from that. Doing things this way was brilliant, and the chocolate melted really easily! The jug made it super easy to pour into the moulds, and I even had enough white chocolate left over to make an extra batch of stars, which I really ended up needing!

https://youtube.com/shorts/ZkT41XxuZT0?feature=share

I bought a silver glitter spray, which was super expensive, but I knew I would need it to spray paint the stars silver, as the silver powder has a hard time sticking to dried and hardened chocolate. I was sincerely grumpy about this as the colour that came out wasn't silver, but more like a shimmery pearl. Sigh. So, I had to sprinkle some silver glitter onto them anyway, but it all turned out ok.

I also bought some lovely little silver star sprinkles, just to add a little something extra, and they really looked very cute around the bottom and the edges of the cake.

Back to the rice paper prints, I don't know if it's happened to you, but I am SUPER paranoid about handling them. It's nerve wrecking to measure the size you want correctly while still leaving enough room for piping (but not too much room), and then storing it, and cutting the print out, all while avoiding smudging at all costs, especially with a print with this much fine detail.

I also had it drummed into me that you cannot store edible prints or fondant in the fridge. This makes one quite panicky when baking in Cape Town in the summer, as you also need to worry about your icing melting.

The problem with storing edible prints and fondant in the fridge is that the colouring runs. HOWEVER, and I did not know this, you actually can store them in the fridge for short periods of roughly 24-48 hours. It's actually the humidity that is a problem. It's moisture that makes the colours run, so, as long as you don't freeze them and you make sure that the humidity levels inside your fridge are less than outside, you're actually on the safe side.

And with this beautiful print I am so pleased! And all things considered, I think the cake turned out to be pretty beautiful and incredibly delicious too!

I will be sharing the recipe ASAP ⭐💙