Golf Cake

Several years ago I took the first two Wilton cake classes with my museum ladies, but with the engagement, wedding, move, and baby, there hasn't been time to make any cakes. However, I love the idea of making fun cakes and I could watch Food Network Cake Challenge for an entire weekend and be perfectly content. I never took any fondant classes and I haven't ventured into that arena yet, except for decorations, so for now the cakes are buttercream frosted. It doesn't look as dramatic, but it tastes quite a bit better.

I knew I wanted to do a 2-tier golf cake so I headed over to Cake Central and started perusing the galleries. You have to sign up for a free account to see all of the pictures but it's pretty much the best time waster ever. There are thousands and thousands of photos from extremely talented home bakers. You can either click on one of the pre-determined galleries, or you can go to the search bar and type in virtually any word you can think of and come up with a gallery of cakes that fits your description. "Purple," "Modern," "Snowman," "Golf," etc.

So after I got some golf inspiration, I sketched out what I wanted the cake to look like and then made a 3-day plan for the construction. The party was on Saturday night, so the cake prep started on Thursday. You could definitely do everything in 2 days, but not if you have a baby and not if you have back problems that preclude you from standing in a kitchen for hours and hours at a time.

The cake definitely wasn't perfect, being my first one; the buttercream could have been smoother, the piped lines could have been better, etc, but I was really pleased with the way it turned out. There are several family birthdays coming up in the next few months so I'm hoping to use their celebrations as a great reason to keep practicing. In the meantime, here is a rough idea of the directions and some pictures.



Thursday

* Make white chocolate golf balls (with toothpicks in the back to help them stay on the cake)
* Make raspberry filling for cakes
* Make double batch of buttercream frosting (if you're making a cake that will have decorator elements, you can't use canned frosting, it's WAY too soft)
* Make cardboard squares for bottom of both cake tiers


Friday

* Make 4 square cakes (2 of each size)
* Measure bottom tier, make square template for fondant diamonds (for plaid)
* Make fondant decorations: squares for plaid, tee box, tee box balls, golf green
* Assemble & fill cakes, dowel bottom cake for sturdiness, & crumb coat both tiers
* Refrigerate cakes, then wrap in saran wrap


Saturday

* Make extra batch of frosting because the first 2 batches weren't enough (oops!)
* Frost cakes
* Stack cakes & insert main dowel
* Decorate sides (plaid & golf balls)
* Decorate top
* Pipe on white for plaid, pipe on grass edges

Sketch

White chocolate golf balls.
The toothpicks were inserted towards the very end of their drying process so they'd stay upright.

Top and bottom tier.
Filled, stacked, doweled, & crumb coated.

As it turned out, I didn't have the grass tip like I thought I did, so I had to make due with a different one, but it turned out ok.

In the world of cakes it's SACRILEDGE to put non-edible decorations anywhere on the cake. I think that's absurd, even for professional cakes, but that's just my opinion. The non-edible elements on the top are the flag, the small golf ball on the green, and the golfer. The sand trap (brown sugar), the water hazard (piping gel and blue food coloring), the green (fondant), and the tee box with the balls (both fondant) are all edible.