Nature Cakes

Nature Cakes was the tutorial covered during March's monthly meeting.

(Disclaimer: my pictures are a lot worse than the tutorial! But hopefully you can take away some neat tips, like I know all of us did at the meeting last week.)

Nature cakes refer to cakes that look like nature. Dirt, bushes, sand, rocks, etc. Here are some quick ideas Colleen shared with us.

1. Use a brush to provide texture to your chocolate frosting. (Warning: silicon brushes tend to rip the frosting off so be warned. Stick with natural bristles.) All Colleen is doing is tapping the brush gently on the top of the cake.

Click below for more ideas...

 2.  For sand, use crushed up cookies. (Other ideas include brown sugar.)

3. For rocks you can either use pre-purchased chocolate rocks (image below, at left)  or fondant (image below, at right).  To make your own rocks just mix in orange, grey, brown (or another color) into white fondant... but don't blend it all together (you'll want some strips of color still showing).  Break off a piece and just form into a rough rock shape.  (For chocolate rocks, I've seen them at Diddams and specialty candy shops.)

4. Want to make bushes but don't have a fondant/clay extruder? Well, use random household items.

Here Colleen is using a wire strainer.  Just put a blob of fondant and use a tool to slowly push it through the mesh. (She's using a mini silicon rolling pin.  Anything with a thick rounded edge will do.)

You can even use a few colors (i.e. different shades of green) to get a more natural look to the bushes.

After you've pushed the fondant through just cut it off using a sharp knife.  Check out how neat the texture is!

Another unique idea was using a tea ball. You know, the little metal balls you put loose leaf tea into.  Same thing as using the mesh strainer, just squeeze the fondant through the holes.

You could also use this to make hair or anything that needs a "grassy" texture.  (Sadly I didn't get a picture of the finished product, but you can see the remnants here after the main portion was cut off.)

Those are all the pictures I took this time.  But next month I'll do a better job of working up tutorials from our monthly meetings.


Jackie