Rev Heads Cake Collaboration for Ford Mustangs 50th Anniversary

About 6 months ago I was contacted by the lovely Sharon Spradley. She told me she was putting together a collaboration that involved 50 male cake decorators in celebration of Ford Mustangs 50th anniversary and she wanted Yeners Way to be a part of it. We thought, why not! It sounded like it would be an awesome opportunity to meet so many great cake decorators around the world, make some new friends, and get our name out there a little. So 6 months later, here we are! The collaboration was revealed on the 1st of January 2015 and I wanted to share some the work that was submitted by all the participants.

My entry…along with some WIP shots.

When I first thought about the collaboration I thought, ok I’ll do a car cake…then I thought…which model of the Ford Mustang should I do and wouldn’t be a bit cliché to just do a regular car cake? Then I thought how bought if I morph the oldest and the newest models together into one somehow. That’s when the idea of the mirror came into mind.

So the idea was to have a double sided mirror that splits half a 1965 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 cake on one side and half a 2016 Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 cake on the other side, giving the illusion that they are both whole car cakes.

I started by searching online for some reference images and printed them all so that I can easily see what the cars look like while I make them. This is very important if you want to achieve realistic results. A couple good resources for reference images are Google images (of course) and another site I use whenever I need high quality images of cars is NetCarShow. They have a lot of great images of almost every model you can think of. Another very important resource when making car cakes is a site called The-Blueprints.com. They have a a wide variety of blueprints (side view, top view etc) of a lot of not only cars but trucks, planes, tanks, boats, trains and almost everything. It’s a wonderful resource for modelling and sculpting in general. They have tons of free ones and also premium ones that are better quality.

I had these mirrors specially cut to size from a manufacturer. I then glued the two mirrors together, and secured them onto the board with two ‘L’ shaped brackets. I couldn’t screw the brackets onto the mirror so I used a hot glue gun to do this. It was a bit of a challenge to get them to stand up at exactly 90 degrees. I knew this cake was not going to be consumed so I didn’t really worry about the cake coming into contact with the hinges and screws but if this was a real cake order, I probably would have secured all of this differently and taken more precautions.

I used a photocopier to enlarge the top and side view blueprints so that they are approximately the size of the final cake. Because this size is larger than an A4 sheet of paper, it’s necessary to glue two sheets together. I also then cut them out so that I can use them to cut out the cakes.

I used the top view and side view blueprints of each car to cut the two half cakes.

For the wheels, I used a couple of moulds I made a while ago out of pastillage. Basically I went to Toys-R-Us and bought some wheel toys that were the perfect size. Then I pushed pastillage into the toys to create the moulds. Very similar to what Verusca Walker talks about in this video.

So first I rolled out the pastillage, the pushed the mould into it and then cut it out with a round cutter. Important thing to remember here is the size needs to be correct according to the blueprints. What I have found with experience is that usually it’s better to make the wheels a little larger because after the masking, and the fondant coating, the car ends up a little bigger than the blueprints. So if you don’t make your wheels slightly larger, they will end up looking too small on the car. Also, even though for this cake I made the wheels in white pastillage and then airbrushed them black, it’s much better practice to mix a black coloured pastillage first, and make the wheels from that. This slipped my mind when I was doing this cake and because I had already started making the wheels, I was a bit lazy to go back and re-do them.

Here are the cakes after shaping and carving them in more detail by referring to the reference images.

Here they are after coating them with fondant and marking the windows, doors and panels by referring to the reference images.

This was the first time I ever had to do ‘half’ a car cake and it was definitely unusual and came with a set of different challenges that I did not think of at first. Normally shaping a 3D car cake, one is able to visualise the entire cake and make the correct proportions but trying to make sure that half the car was really half the car so that it wouldn’t be too wide or narrow was challenging. Another challenge was getting the inside part of each car to be completely flat to sit right up against the mirror.

In the end I am very happy with the outcome and it was fun to make a car cake a bit different than how it’s normally done.

Serdar Yener’s entry and his words about it.

Here’s the thing. I am joining a collaboration about Ford Mustang’s 50 year Anniversary along side of so many great pastry chefs and we have all made countless 3 dimensional car cakes over the years. So should I make another 3D car cake? No.

I wanted to make something different and I wanted it to relate to Ford Mustang but I didn’t want it to be a logo or a cake. So what then. So I decided to make a sculpture of a wild horse resembling the logo but not a copy of it. I love making animal sculptures and I wanted to try to take a snap shot of a frozen moment in time while a Mustang horse is running wild and free at high speed, just like a real Ford Mustang. I hope that this piece captures the essence of Ford Mustang and what it means to me.

Decorating food has a history and a changing trend throughout the centuries. Margarine and ice sculptures have been used to decorate buffet tables as early as the food became a part of our lifestyle. While margarine can be used like a really soft plasticine for modelling, an ice block can be carved like soft stone. Both can be used to decorate tables and buffets to please the eye before the tummy but their duty stops there. Through out time, Chefs started using chocolate because it combined both these purposes. Glucose can be added to make the chocolate more like plasticine, or one could simple take a block of chocolate and carve it like a stone. However, one of the most ideal and easy materials to sculpt with is margarine. More specifically, hard pastry margarine.

Pastry margarine provides the perfect combination of firmness to allow for a lot of detail, as well as being creamy to be able to blend, smooth and join easily. Using chocolate however, gives a Chef more of a sense of pride. I do not know if it has been tried before but for this piece I mixed 20% of cocoa powder with the margarine to make it look like it was chocolate while still retaining the consistency of margarine.

After the piece was completed as a chocolate margarine sculpture, I decided to go one step further and I sprayed it with an edible silver coat to closer resemble the metallic Mustang logo and bring it to life.

My dad decided to record the process as he made his piece so we will be publishing a tutorial on how the horse was made within a month or two.

Now let’s see some of the other awesome entries!

Please visit the Revheads Facebook page to see the rest of the amazing entries, or enjoy the video below 🙂

Special thanks to Sharon Spradley from Curiaussiety Custom Cakes for making this project happen.