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Killer Rats Cake |
by Barbara Jo
The first step in constructing the rats was to make the gum paste and fondant pieces that needed time to dry before they could be attached to the cake. I did this about five days before the party.
The rat ears are simply gum paste, rolled very thin, then cut into the shape of ears. I then thinned the edges even further with a ball tool and pinched the bottoms together to give the ears the appropriate shape.
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The rat faces were a much more difficult proposition. As I always do, I started by finding a few good research photos to work off of. Of course, I couldn't find any pictures of rats that were as mean as I wanted my rats to be, so I supplemented the photos with the use of a really ugly, vicious, battery operated rat toy that I once bought for Barbara May at a KB Toys that was going out of business.
I made the rat faces out of a fifty-fifty mixture of gum paste and fondant. At first I had a lot of trouble sculpting them because I couldn't figure out how to handle them and set them down without distorting the features I had already carved. Eventually I discovered that I shouldn't try to pick them up, just set them on wax paper, noses facing up, and work on them that way. After that, things went much more smoothly and, with the help of various gum paste sculpting tools and a lot of shortening to keep the gum paste-fondant mix moist enough to work for the requisite period of time, I was able to crank out three pretty vicious looking rat faces, two with open mouths, one with mouth clenched as if he were in the process of ripping off a succulent morsel of flesh.
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The next step was to cut a foam core base for each rat, which obviously necessitated my planning the body shape and position of each rat, so I would be able to stick the base to the cake, then carve around it.
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Finally it was time for the actual cake. Barbara May was kind enough to bake the cakes for me. We used a red velvet cake recipe so the rats would look nice and meaty inside, and we started with three 10" round cakes. I then took each cake, leveled the top and split it into two layers using a cake leveler. Cutting each of these layers in half along the diameter of the circle allowed me to assemble the four resulting pieces into a four layer cake shaped like a semi-circle. I used buttercream icing as my filling between layers.
Once I had torted and filled all three cakes in that fashion, I was ready to carve, which is one of my favorite parts of the cake construction process. I started with the first cake upside down and stuck the foam core base to it with buttercream icing. Using a small, sharp kitchen knife I cut the cake so that it was about half an inch larger than the base all around, then flipped the cake sight side up. I then did the more detailed carving, rounding the body, giving the rat haunches, and cutting the front carefully so that the head would line up properly.
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Having carved all three cakes, I was ready to attach the heads, which I did using buttercream icing, reinforced with a toothpick stuck between then back of the head and the front of the cake. I then frosted the rats with buttercream icing. I took two layers of icing, with some dry time in between, to cover most of the red in the cake.
Before adding fur, I used my cake airbrush to put a base coat of color on each rat. I planned to make one white rat, one brown rat, and one grey rat. For the white rat I used a pink base coat with some darker red and orange shadows. For the brown rat, I used a reddish-brown base, but left some lighter pink highlights. For the grey rat, I used a medium grey base, but with lighter grey and pink highlights. Then I decided that I wasn't satisfied with them, so I airbrushed in even more shadows and highlights.
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The next step was the application of fur, which was made of spun sugar. I had decided, after a few experiments, for the sake of time to make all the fur colorless, then airbrush on the colors. Using Jacque Torres's recipe for spun sugar, I set up two long wooden spoons hanging over the edge of the counter, wrapped half the kitchen in plastic bags, then proceeded to fling hot sugar absolutely everywhere.
Because my spun sugar tools had a tendency to get gunked up and need to be washed after only five or six uses, it was good that I had two. One was a whisk with the curved ends cut off; the other was a wooden ruler with some cut up pieces of wire taped to it. The wire ends of either tool were dunked into a bowl of hot sugar, then whipped back and forth over the two wooden spoons, leaving a trail of thin strands of sugar behind. I then scooped up these thin strands and draped them over the rat bodies. After I had finished the first rat, I decided I had put too much fur on it, so I did less fur on the other two. As it turned out, I was wrong. The first rat, the one with more fur, wound up looking better than the other two.
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Airbrushing onto spun sugar turns out to be a tricky operation because the sugar is so thin that it tends to dissolve if it gets wet. Long story short, I oversprayed the rats and the two with less fur wound up looking patchy and diseased. I rationalized this by saying that the scene took place in some kind of abandoned government lab which was full of all sorts of chemicals and viruses and the like. No wonder the rats are diseased! The rat that I thought had too much fur wound up looking really good.
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Before applying the final coat of airbrushed color, I stuck ears to each rat, by simply jamming the bottoms of the ears into the cakes. I obviously should have attached them better, because several of them fell off and later had to be reattached.
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There are details too delicate to the airbrushed onto cake rats, so I went in with a little brush to paint the insides of mouths and ears and eyes and noses. I also gave little white royal icing teeth to the one rat whose mouth remained open. The other rat that was supposed to have an open mouth settled somewhere along the line and wound up with a closed mouth. The third rat, of course, had a closed mouth to begin with.
The rats still needed, feet, tails, and bloody snouts, but that had to wait until they were positioned on the cake base, so I'll cover that in the Assembly section, which means we're ready to move on to . . .