When I first started making sugar figures for cakes, one of my favorite things to do was give them a fun expression. Make them laugh! Make them wink! Make their cheeks blush pale pink! One day, when I was working on a little sugar fairy for my niece's birthday cake, my friend exclaimed, "It looks like she's about to talk! Like at any moment she's going to fly around the room and tell us a wonderful fairy tale about a time long ago."
I laughed and replied, "I would love to hear a story from a sugar fairy told on top of a cake. That would be the sweetest fairy tale ever!"
A few months later, I was putting the finishing touches on I Wish I Were A Fairy Tale, and was thinking of how the story was going to be illustrated. I knew exactly how I wanted each page to look, from the chocolate colored tree stump where the fairies lived, to the cotton candy clouds where the unicorns played. Even though I could see them, I could not draw them. "Oh, why can't I draw or paint!" I complained to my mother.
"Well, you can sculpt, that's something." She replied, kindly.
"I can sculpt sugar paste and carve out cake, but that doesn't help me illustrate a book. I can't very well make a children's picture book out of cake!"
"Why can't you?" she asked, "that sounds like one delicious book to me!"
"Because I've never seen sugar used to illustrate a book. As far as I know, it has not been done before."
"That doesn't mean it can't be done. Why don't you try it, you might be surprised. After all, cake is edible art."
Emily, the adventurous little girl who climbed up Rapunzel's hair to enter into the pages of her very own fairy tale!
Baking a fairy tale
The more I pondered my mom's advice, the more I believed she might be right. Sugar paste or fondant figurines are similar to stop motion characters, such as those used in the animated movies The Nightmare Before Christmas and Wallace and Gromit. Both stop motion character and sugar paste characters can be given any facial expression, and can physically act out the words of a story. From balancing on top of a dragon's tail, to playing under a waterfall, even being stuck in bed with a cold. Of course, what would make my characters different from stop motion was that my dragon's tail would be made out of tiny hand-cut pieces of sugar paste, the waterfall would actually be a flowing river of frosting, and the bed would be a small chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream sheets.
Could I do it? There was only one way to find out!
I decided to start with the page where the main character, Emily, becomes a mermaid. I chose that page because it was similar to a classic tiered cake, and also because I like mermaids (well, I actually have a slight... okay, huge obsession with mermaids. I firmly believe I was a mermaid in another life). I sculpted Emily to look like my niece at around eight-years-old, with big brown eyes and adorable pigtails.
Emily sitting on a white chocolate clamshell, complete with a sugar pearl.
After many, many, many, (did I mention many?) sculpted faces, I finally got the expression and look I wanted. After reading up on classic animation, I learned that animators usually put their character in the same color. This is why Emily is almost always wearing blue, including her mermaid tail and matching top. The clamshell "throne" is made out of white chocolate with fondant details.
Once I sculpted the main figure, the next step was to make the cake. I baked a vanilla cake with salted caramel buttercream for both tiers (vanilla for the sand, salt for the sea, and caramel because...well, because it tastes good!). I covered the cakes in swirled fondant with different variations of blue and white to look like the ocean's current.
After that, I needed to make Emily some new mermaid friends. Swimming around the bottom cake is Mermaid Wavy, who is very good at finding sunken treasure, and is loved by every fish beneath the sea. Near the top of the cake you will find Reef, a mermaid who loves to laugh, and is very excited to see a puppy for the very first time, especially one that is able to snorkel!
I added some coral, a few fish, a curious seahorse, some brown sugar sand, and voila! I could hardly believe it. The cake was actually illustrating a page of the story.
Turns out my mom was right (she's usually right, BUT NEVER TELL HER I SAID THAT), sugar really can be turned into picture book illustrations.
That day I called my friend and told her, "Guess what? My sugar fairy really does have a story to tell!"
She laughed, "Sounds scrumptious! Can't wait to hear it."
So began my year long adventure of baking a fairy tale.
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I Wish I Were A Fairy Tale: A Story Illustrated With Cakes is available here:
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