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Beastie the BSD Daemon Cake
Skin
This next part is going to go pretty quick, and I apologize for that. The hardest part was at hand, and that was applying the skin. For that, we needed a lot of fondant. A lot. I had just purchased a nice little fondant rolling mat, which really came in handy.
You need to roll out a lot of this stuff. The nice thing about the mat was that it could be picked up and used to drape the fondant over the cake, with minimal tearing. Unfortunately, there was some stickage between the fondant and the mat, so I had to carefully scrape it away with a bowl scraper and hope for the best.
Here's the problem with the fondant: it's not very forgiving when it comes to seams. Ideally, there would have just been one big seam down the back, which would have been barely noticeable. Sadly, I didn't have enough fondant rolled out, so we ended up doing a lot of patchwork. This was really messy. Really messy. It very quickly started looking like Beastie had a rare skin disorder. And since the fondant wasn't nearly as forgiving on seams as, say, modelling chocolate, trying to fix it wasn't going all that well.
That's when I got a couple of truly brilliant ideas. You see, when you make the fondant, it's warm. That's how come you don't end up with a wrinkly dough: the wrinkles all disappear when you knead the warm dough. So why not warm up the dough? And what easier way to do so than with what? That's right, kiddies! My beloved creme brulee torch! The idea was to warm it up just a little, and then work at it with fondant tools to smooth it out. It was working reasonably well, but that was when I got my second brilliant idea. Perhaps a little moisture would help things out. In fact, it would be really nice to add just a little moisture that would quickly evaporate when we were finished. Those of you who read the Black Chandelier tutorial know that this means Everclear.
Suddenly, I got my next brilliant idea: why not combine the two methods? Before I go any further, I need to tell you people: Don't try this at home! Ever! Everclear has all those warnings on the bottle about open flames for a very good reason. Lighting it on fire, intentionally or accidentally, is incredibly dangerous. That said, I'm a professional, so I tried it out. It was very addictive, painting on Everclear, torching it, and then blowing out the flame a couple of seconds later. It got the fondant just warm enough to work with, and while it still looked like he had a rare skin disorder, at least it also looked like he had been to the skin doctor for it a few times.
And yes, we did turn out the lights for a little pyrotechnic photography.
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