Commission: Earth Structural Layer Cake

Backstory: A little while ago, my sister approached me with an idea. She's doing an education degree, and her and her friends had to give a series of lessons on the geological sciences to a class of primary school kids. One of their lessons involved teaching the kids about the structure of the Earth. One of her friends came up with the idea of presenting a model of the Earth made out of cake. So my sister asked me if I could make a spherical cake with all the layers of the Earth inside it.

I told her I couldn't do it. "How do you get a sphere inside a sphere inside a sphere?" I recall saying. "Oh yeah," she replied, realising what it would involve.

I spent the rest of the afternoon thinking about it. I don't admit defeat. Ever. But especially not with cake. Nothing is impossible is pretty much my baking motto, so to say this cake was impossible left me feeling weird. There had to be a way. A way that didn't involve carving or crumbing the cake. I kept mulling it over until I had a breakthrough.

I actually ended up coming up with a couple ideas, but I couldn't do my Plan A due to equipment restrictions. So I went with Plan B: baking a cake inside a cake inside a cake.

Tech details: The inner core is vanilla buttercake, the outer core is lemon Madeira sponge, the mantle is orange Madeira sponge. The 'crust' of the Earth is made from buttercream, then it's all covered with marshmallow fondant. I marbled a little white fondant through the blue to make it look like clouds. I hand cut the continents then painted them using food colouring and a dry brush technique. The continents took me about 6 hours straight and I'd be lying if I said I didn't end up hating it. What started as a determination for pin-point accuracy became 'let's get this shiz done'. The painting took probably 3/4 of that time. It took 5eva. But I'm glad I did it because I think it looks a lot better then plain green fondant would have.

More pics at my blog: [link]


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