A special cake for our special friends

The last time we were living here in Modesto, our friends Jeff and Sherry Vail practically adopted us. We’re friends with their daughters, we come to the family birthday parties, we’ve met the grandparents. We’re tight. So when Jeff asked us to make something special for Sherry’s 50th birthday party, we jumped at the chance.

The timing was a little less than ideal. The last week of June saw me feverishly preparing all the papers I delivered at my big conference, canning pounds and pounds of green tomatoes, and crafting Sherry’s entire family out of sugar. I was a big fat stressball. But I couldn’t turn anything down, I wanted to do it all too much.

Jeff and Sherry are super into backpacking, so we thought we’d make them a mountain with the family hiking behind her. The last few times I’ve tried to make fondant figurines were total disasters, so I was a little nervous, but this time I discovered the secret – edible glue.

There are magic powders you can buy all over the internet, but the stuff I used is made by Wilton (which means you may be able to find it at Michaels occasionally) and is called Gum-Tex. I mixed 1/2 a tsp into a cup of water, shook it up and then let it dissolve to create a clear glue. You can also mix this into sugar or gum paste if you need to soften it.

Bear baked the cake and filled it with a strawberry whipped cream, then iced it with buttercream and covered it with fondant.

The nice part of making a mountain cake is that sloppy fondant work only looks more like rock, so we got to just plop the fondant on top and not worry about making anything smooth anywhere. We used sanding sugar to make a trail, piped a little grass here and there, and rolled up fondant to look like rocks.

We’re getting better at this cake decorating thing every time we do it, but we still have so very much to learn. I managed, through loads of edible glue and toothpicks pinning everything together, to succeed in making some figurines, but there has got to be a better way of doing it. With all the attention on these fancy cake shops, I wish someone would write a book about how to do some of these things.