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Black Chandelier Cake
The Equipment
As you might imagine, there was a bit of hardware required to put together a cake like this. Aside from the obvious mixing bowls, measuring cups and spoons, etc, you will want the following:
- 16-inch cake base
- 14-inch plastic cake round
- 10-inch plastic cake round
- 12-inch plastic cake round
- cake heating core
- 12-inch round cake pan
- 10-inch round cake pan
- 8-inch round cake pan
- scissors
- parchment paper
- 1/2-inch thick wooden dowel
- 1/2-inch wood drill bit
- 8 x 1 1/4-inch wood screw
- 1/8-inch drill bit
- 8 x 1-inch washer
- rolling pin
- piping bag(s)
- #3 piping tip
- serated knife
- off-set spatula
- cake turntable (optional)
- craft foam
- X-acto knife
- acetate sheet(s)
- rubber cement
- unmounted Alice in Wonderland rubber stamps
- pastry brush
Maybe a couple of things need a little explanation. Cake rounds are usually made out of cardboard. Think of it as kind of a cheap, disposable plate made especially for cakes. As it turns out, they make them out of plastic too. The plastic ones are a little more expensive, and still pretty much disposable. But they are plastic, so as long as you're responsible for bringing the cake in and the leftovers out, they're pretty much reusable too.
If you were to take a stack of four or five cake rounds and stack them, and then wrap them in pretty foil, then you would have a cake base. If you're lazy like me, then you just buy the cake base from the cake store. It's largely disposable too, but stable enough to handle the weight of most modest-sized cakes.
You may be wondering why I told you to get cake rounds that are larger than the cake pans. As it turns out, you're going to cut them up in a moment, and believe it or not, they're a little smaller than you'd think.
I found craft foam at my crafty-type store for about a buck a sheet. Your mileage may vary. That's also where I got t he X-acto knife and the rubber cement. You can probably find acetate at florist shops, but if you don't, you can buy it online.
The rubber stamps had me worried for a moment. We wanted Victorian images on the sides of the cakes, and we didn't know how we were going to do it until I stumbled upon a site called, and I kid you not, Stamp Francisco. Cute, huh? Go there and do a search for "alice". I picked out nine different Alice in Wonderland stamps, and then spent way too much time looking at all the other killer stamps they had there. They have stamps that are made from actual photographs. How cool is that? Pick your poison, just make sure none of the stamps you pick out are larger than 4 inches wide and 3 inches tall. And make sure you get them unmounted. You'll thank me for that later.
