Fresh Beat Band Cake

I was asked if I could do a Fresh Beat cake. When I first read this in an email, I read it as Fresh Beet being that I had never heard of The Fresh Beat Band. I reread the email because I knew this cake was for a 5 year old girl and I thought fresh beet cake might be an odd choice. While I myself, and most likely my kids too, would love a fresh beet cake, most people contact me for a cake with a character or something of the like on it for their kid's birthday parties. I was right to reread this email. Apparently, Fresh Beat Band is a very popular show :)

I did a little research on the show and realized that they are real people. I am not quite that talented to make real people out of fondant, so I decided to just do a cute little guitar to replicate one that one of the characters plays on the show. She asked for dark purple icing because she loves purple so much, but the other colors on the cake were based on the logo for the show. One of the things that baffled me about the cake, however, was how to do the strings on the guitar. It takes a lot of practice to be able to pipe super skinny strings. It is a skill that I have not yet mastered. My wonderful husband suggested that I do the strings out of fondant. I thought it was a great idea, but was a little nervous about moving them onto the cake for fear that they may break. My wonderful husband then offered to make the strings for me. I knew it would be quite time consuming to make these super skinny fondant strings that were strong enough to be moved around. It took him a while to do, but he did it, and I think they were fantastic. All in all, I was proud of the cake. I thought it was super cute, and I know the vanilla cake and French buttercream tasted yummy :)

Have you ever experimented with different extracts or flavorings? If you have a nicely stocked baking cabinet, you most likely have several different flavorings. You can change your vanilla white cake to a white almond cake easily if you have almond extract. You can turn your simple yellow cake into a lemon cake by adding a few drops of lemon extract. You may not always have a fresh lemon, but it's easy to keep a bottle of lemon extract in your cabinet. Just make sure you buy the best extracts and flavorings that you can. Obviously, "immitation" flavorings or extracts are not going to yield as good of a flavor as the real thing. They can often lead to off flavors along with undesirable, underlying alcohol flavors.