Coraline cake

This weekend there is a local cake competition here in Austin. Last year I went to "That Takes the Cake" and looked at all the fabulous cakes, but I didn't really feel ready at the time to enter. So I've been looking forward to entering the competition for the last year.

It took me awhile to figure out what to make. A friend of mine suggested "Coraline" and I thought it would make a great cake. I should have taken pictures as I constructed this cake. It's hard to get an idea of scale from the photos.

The figures are all modeled out of gumpaste and/or fondant. The mouse is hand-painted with food coloring.

The cake itself is two 8-inch cakes on the top and bottom with four 6-inch cakes stacked in the middle. The four cakes in the middle are all frosted together. I treated this as a 3-tier cake, essentially, icing and covering each section independently and then dowling on each layer.

I was pretty nervous about getting Coraline to look right and I think, for the most part, I was successful. I think I'm going to be holding my breath all weekend that the whole thing stays together. I remember seeing some partly collapsed cakes last year and thinking it was such a shame. We'll see how it goes!