With a teenager to impress, I have to step up my cake making game. This year Cody gave me a Zelda theme seeing as that is his video game of the moment. When I opted for a shield, we negotiated the use of fondant over frosting. Cody preferred to eat the frosting, but wanted the cake to look sharp, so he gave me permission to prioritize looks over taste.
The shape itself was a bit difficult to create as I had extremely crumbly chocolate cake to work with (only box cake left at Meijer), and it required a large amount of frosting to hold together. Fortunately, I was attempting to make my own buttercream frosting with this cake, so plenty of frosting was not a problem. I can't say I really liked the flavor of it, but it was nice to be able to whip up as much as I needed to get my cake solidly formed. It also helped that it was about 20 degrees outside, which gave me my own blast-chiller to work with.
The rest was all fondant work on top of the cake to get the look right. A little bit of printing out shield shapes and tracing onto fondant. The type of fondant I have been using is still not as stiff as I would like it to be for sharp shapes like these, but I will continue to refine that I guess.
In the end, it turned out quite sharp, and the few fans of Zelda who saw the pictures approved.
