Cake Competition

So this last weekend was a very busy weekend for me. I was asked to make two cakes for a birthday party. One was a castle, and one was another tiara cake. It was a bit stressful, but it was also very fun. I got those cakes done just in time to start making the cake for my cake competition. That's right, I entered a cake decorating competition. I'm still working on one class, but I've been doing a lot of cakes recently, and I've had so much fun working with fondant, that I thought I'd enter, just for the fun of it. I entered in the Fondant and Gumpaste category. This was a new category this year, and there were a lot of problems leading up to the competition. In fact, I didn't even get a clear set of rules until Thursday, and I was to compete on Saturday. However, I did have a plan, and it all worked out in the end.

Here I am waiting to begin. I only had a few things, because really I didn't need much. I chose to do a simple, but hopefully elegant cake, and I wanted it to shock, so I made the cake black. Yes black. I thought how pretty would it be to have a black cake with tons of white decorations on it? If you look closely you can see a styrofoam circle, that is holding all my gumpaste roses I made. They have to dry, so we had to make all our flowers (if we were using them) ahead of time, and then when the cake was done, the judges would come and watch us make a flower so they knew we weren't cheating. This is my finished product. I LOVE how it turned out. I don't think I could be happier with it, than I was. It was very simple. I like simple though. I imagine that this could have been a nice anniversary, or engagement style cake. Elegant, but not too fancy. I had so much fun putting it together!
Here is one of the sprays on the cake, this is positioned on the first tier.
these are the roses on the top. I'm sure I could have put more, but I didn't have any more. I only made so many the night before, I still think it looks pretty.
And here I am accepting my prize. I took third place. For my first competition, I'll take third in a heartbeat. I honestly don't think I could have done anything better than what I had put together here. I was very happy with the end result, and very happy to win third place! It was an exciting day. The worst part was right after the judging, we had to cut our cake and serve it to everyone! It was very hard cutting into what I'd just worked so hard to create! It tasted good though!