Diploma Cake

This cake was made for my good friend Ryan's graduation party. (yay Ryan!) The inspiration for this cake came from a fellow poster on cake central and wilton's sites, which is typically where most of my inspiration is drawn from.

Half of this cake is milk chocolate and the other half is vanilla. The entire thing is covered in vanilla bc with fondant accents. The UNT logo was my first attempt at a frozen buttercream transfer. Seriously, the last two weeks have presented me with a lot of new "firsts." I wanted to do it this way because from what I have seen, FBCT's come out smooth and clean and they look a little better than the pin prick method. I think there's a time and place that each of these methods work appropriately.

So here's what you do - print out an image in reversed form in the size that you want it on your cake. Tape the image to a cutting board or piece of plexiglass. My cutting board was too big and I didn't happen to have a piece of plexiglass laying around, so I used the back of one of my Magic Line pans (9x13). Tape a piece of wax paper on top of that - WAX, not parchment. Pin prick method use parchement - frozen buttercream transfer, use wax paper. Got it.

After that, outline your image with buttercream in whichever color you choose. Some people choose to outline in black, but I choose to make transfer exactly like the logo and that did not include black. Tip - it's a good idea to wait a few minutes after you do your outline. This allows your buttercream to dry a bit and will definitely make it easier when you are filling in. Fill in your image after the outline is complete. I read a lot from other posters on the sites I frequent to get a good idea of which tips to use that would make the process easier and most girls went with a #4 or 5 tip (Wilton, I haven't used Ateco but I really want to at some point). I used the #5 and some parchment triangles to fill in my transfer. I choose the the simplest logo that UNT had thinking it would be the easiest to replicate and the quickest considering the cake was ENORMOUS and was going to take me a while to ice. Despite what I thought, it wasn't easy. Okay okay, it was easy, just tedious and very time consuming. I think I spent almost 3 hours on it. Once you have the colors filled in, you should then put a layer of white icing over the entire thing. This is to ensure that the colors won't bleed onto your cake.

After the transfer has been filled in, put it in the freezer for a minimum of 90 minutes. I think I left mine in for 3 hours or so.

After you have iced your cake and made sure that it has crusted appropriately (you can only use a crusting buttecream when doing transfers), take your transfer out of the freezer and off of your flat surface. Flip it onto your cake and pull the wax paper off - voila! You have a neat and smooth image on your cake!

The transfer came out well, I think. It was my first one so I didn't expect anything spectacular. I got what I was going for and everyone could definitely tell that it was a UNT logo. I'm sure they will get better and better.

This cake was insanity to ice. Pure insanity. They do not make sword-like spatulas and a sword-like spatula I needed. Though, if they do, please point me in the direction of this place so that this may never be my problem again. Anyway point is, it was hard for me to use my spatula on this cake - it wouldn't reach far enough and kept leaving handle marks on the sides. Also difficult, the fact that I didn't have enough space in my kitchen to put the cake board. I don't have a ton of counter space anyway so this was definitely not working out. I had to ice it on the dining table which now seems a lot shorter since Rylee can just put her hand up there and grab for things. I had a few close calls with the infant cake swiper. I managed though.

I think everyone enjoyed the cake. They seemed to anyway. The party was great and I didn't have a lot of time to notice if people were enjoying it or not.

I also made 50 diploma cookies for this ocassion but they are the same ones I made for the tea two weeks ago, no picture needed.