Can You Make a Corset? 'Course I can!

I'm heading ever-nearer to the June cake overload I have in 2 weeks, and I'm petrified!

So I had an easy one last week - the boyfriend's 22nd birthday! Jim didn't know what he was getting, and a few months ago all he suggested was "boobs." Hey ho, let's go! I've got the design to this cake in a book I got for christmas, and I thought it was a saucy (and err.. Classy?) version of the general tongue-in-cheek kind of naughty cakes you get.

I had a really big problem though - the boobs. How in the world do I make a boob out of cake? I know you can carve cakes to the shape, but I'm not very good at that. If I bugger up, that's it - back to square one. In the book all it said was to use "bowl-shaped cakes." Hmm. My local cake shop actually stock spherical tins (a ball of cake, what what?!?) so I thought yeah I could use them and just half the ball, but they were out for hire at the time I needed them. Crap! So I suggested to the shop owner that I had a (very) small Pyrex glass bowl - would that work? "Yes! It's oven-proof, just like when you make a casserole in a glass dish and bake it," she said. Duhhhh, what an idiot :P

So I painted the inside of the bowl in butter using a pastry brush, and added in the mixture. Baked for about half an hour, as of course the bowl is a lot deeper than a general sandwich tin. When the skewer came out clean, I carefully used a knife to ease the edges of the cake from the bowl, and it turned out a peferct boob shape!

The chest is just a usual 10in square cake, double-layered. I made a boob of it (de-dum-dum!) though, as when I had adjusted the shelves in my oven to let the cakes rise nicely, I accidently re-inserted them at an angle, and I couldn't understand why when I took the square cakes out, they had only risen on one side, and then gently sloped down the other. Oh god! What a blessing in disguise this was!! The instructions in the book had suggested that to make the chest of the corset, to carve it down to her waist, so it was higher near her boobs. Because of my error, no carving was necessary - the cakes sloped naturally down - hahaha!

I covered the cakes in the usual way, just separating the colours as I did so: the flesh icing covered the boobs, the lilac on the chest. I scored a line down the centre of the corset for the join, and then used the end of a thin paintbrush (one I only use for baking!) to make small holes either side of the line. Using my sugarcraft gun, I used a tiny circle stencil in the end of it to push out lengths of thin black sugarpaste, which were then cut to size and attached to the holes with edible glue in a criss-cross pattern. Using a slightly thicker circle stencil, I pushed out lengths of lilac sugarpaste for the corset bones. For the frilly edge at the top, I used a garrett frill stencil (it's like a circular cutter, with a frilly edge) to cut out a length of frill.

Jim was very happy with his boobs :)

Remember: Cakes by Kirsten can be found on Facebook!

Happy Baking! x