A Giant Cupcake

When my friend Vanessa's daughter requested a giant cupcake as her first Communion cake a couple of years ago, my first reaction was, Seriously?  How can I possibly do that?  I had never made a sculpted cake, and had only made a few cakes for friends at the time.  And I had of course never tried to lay fondant onto a shaped surface, let alone a foot-tall cupcake.

But after I scoured Pinterest and gathered up my courage, my response to Vanessa was, Sure!  No problem!  I had seen enough variations on the giant cupcake theme to believe that I could manage it.

Since Vanessa wanted chocolate cake for the bottom and vanilla cake for the top, it gave me a good reason to stack 4 cakes of each flavor together for each half of the cake, essentially making two separate cakes on two separate cake rounds.  (Above is what our fridge usually looks like, mid-cake.  We live in a small house and have only have one fridge, so all our beer and food gets shifted up to higher shelves or down into the veggie crispers when there is a cake or two in process.)

I then took a long serrated knife to the bottom and narrowed the bottom into a cupcake liner shape, and the top into a massive frosting swirl.  (More on all that extra cake another time!)  I laid the pink fondant over the top of the cupcake liner, just as you would do any normal layer cake, and pressed indented lines into it with a clean ruler.  In retrospect, I think I should have wrapped the fondant around the side instead of draping it over the top, to lessen the risk of tearing and also to avoid stretching and pulling to smooth around the bottom.  However, that would have resulted in a seam at the back, so maybe I did make the right choice.

It's a bit nerve-wracking to start shaving off cake from your cake, knowing there is no undo button to let you put it back on if you hack off too much.  I ended up shaving one side of the swirl down a bit more than I should have, and ended up having to repair the damage with more buttercream.

But who doesn't love more buttercream.  I mean, come ON.

I put off laying on the fondant on the top for as long as I could, because I was so nervous about ruining the buttercream swirl I had made, or tearing the fondant.  Off I went though, finally.  I got the fondant on in one piece, and spent a good deal of time smoothing and finishing it.  I probably should have laid on the fondant while the two cakes were separate too, but it ended up ok.

This is as finished as I could get it, minus the gigantic sprinkles I made out of fondant.  See all those little wrinkles around the bottom of the swirl?  Since I was still learning how to manage fondant, I wasn't able to pull it back together as perfectly as I would have liked, and I had to cut and seal a couple of seams around the bottom of the white fondant. 

Overall, I was very happy with how it turned out (and so was Vanessa), but there are plenty of other little issues that I will always notice when I look at pictures of this cake.

I love how this picture captures the scale of this oversized cupcake.

But, as my husband always reminds me when I'm in the throes of finishing a cake that has little issues like this:  "Jen, it's food.  People are going to eat it."

This is also the cake that taught me that you should keep a mega cake like this in the fridge overnight before you let anyone drive it to their house.  But that's another story for another day.  I'm just happy Vanessa is still talking to me.