Mary is known at my office as the "vegetarian." Nothing against vegetarians, I have a ton of friends that are, but it's more that Mary is in denial. Why we believe Mary is in denial:
- We'll go to a fancy restaurant and she will go through the menu and say . . . "oooo I think i'm going to get the TOFU steak."
- Mary naturally ALWAYS gravitates to vegetables
- Mary has NEVER been seen eating a steak
- Her first time eating SuiMai she picked at the wrapper eating everything but the Pork
Okay . . onto the cake, but in this case it was a brownie. The idea for her birthday brownie was a collaboration between myself and Jocelyn who is a super foodie/yelp elite (who is against Mary's food choices). We decided to make Mary a garden cake due to her love of vegetables and . . . wait for it . . . we were going to add BACON. We decided we could partly use this as a test. If Mary is truly a carnivore she would have to eat the bacon too. Additionally, we had the idea of making garden fences with the bacon to symbolize or act as a metaphor for her closet vegetarianism.
The Brownie:
You will see that I love Martha Stewart. I found this recipe in 2007 in Food Everyday and have used it ever since. The recipe is know as Martha Stewart's Super Fudgy Brownies. I think these brownies are AMAZING, but I have one friend who thinks otherwise. In my opinion, these brownies come out so rich and moist. The best part about brownies are you can add pretty much anything into them . . as you will find out in a future post.
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| BTW Mary did end up eating the Bacon, but we still question her. |
The Garden:
I went online to look for some example gardens and to figure out what vegetables would be easiest to make out of fondant or gum paste. I decided to make:- Lettuce
- Cauliflower
- Carrots
- Tomatoes
- Pumpkins
Making Lettuce and Cauliflower is very similar to making roses. The Lettuce is exactly the same except I texturized the pedals/leaves. With the Cauliflower I did the very same except I used a tiny white ball as the base then added leaves around it. If you don't want to hand texturize you can use the Wilton Flower Impression Mat for the lettuce leaves and the Cauliflower head.
For the carrots I took orange fondant and rolled them into the cones and then used a knife to imprint lines. Before the carrots dried, I pressed a hole into the top of the carrots so I could adhere the carrot leaves once they dried. Fondant gets really tacky when wet. For the leaves, small strips were cut then bunched together. Note for the carrots that were buried in the ground, the bottoms were cut off to give the appearance of being pushed into the cake.
Tomatoes were just red fondant rolled into little balls. I attempted to be fancy and mix in colors to make heirloom tomatoes . . but . . . in the end I didn't use them. I also made some potatoes, rolling brown fondant into balls and just texturizing them by poking tiny holes into them.
The pumpkins were made out of orange fondant that were rolled into a ball. Lines were then imprinted to shape the pumpkin. On the brownie, the pumpkins were complimented by piped buttercream vines and leaves.
The fences were also made out of fondant. Note you need to make these ahead of time to allow them to dry and harden (if you're short on time, you should make these out of gum paste as it hardens much faster). Fondant was rolled out and cut into strips then textured by hand. The best way to do this is by making random lines and applying different pressure when imprinting lines.
The dirt is crushed chocolate cookie wafers. If you can't find those specifically you can always use Oreos minus the cream.
Lastly we have the Scarecrow, which was the focal point . . . or was it? Some would argue it is the bacon. The scarecrow has a wire base. Fondant was layered over the wire. The face was purposely left off as I printed Mary's face and taped it on. If I could do this again, I might have added some luster dust to define the straw a bit more. However in the end i was really happy with it. It even has some curves!
I think that covers it all. Just to recap . . Carmel Buttercream, Bacon and Chocolate go soooo well together.
