Perfect Frame

The most recent cake i made was for my "grandmother" Rose. She has been bowling since way before i was born so when we heard her 80th birthday was gonna be a huge bash i instantly wanted to make her cake! Initially my idea was to do a bowling lane with a ball and pins but sometimes cake is unpredictable in the oven and you have to make due with how it comes out.

In order to make this cake i used my sphere cake pan and my 12" pan. When filling the sphere cake pan i did not put enough batter in it so i adjusted my cake theme. Originally i was going to cut the 12" pan to look like a lane but since my ball idea did not come to fruition i decided to use it to cut bowling pins. To do this i used the tip of a knife to outline pins and when they looked like pins i used the knife to cut them out. The finished pieces looked like this:

Now this isnt where i expected this cake to look like but with a little creativity you can turn anything into something wonderful.

Covering the bowling balls
I was told her ball (the one shes been using for decades) was red so i did my best to dye the fondant red. When you add red food coloring to white fondant its hard to get to the right shade but i finished with a burgundy pink. The first step to covering the cake is frosting it then rolling the fondant over the cake and smoothing it out then removing the extras.

 frosted with buttercream

Rolled fondant (bad flash)

Trimmed

Covering the bowling pins

Each pin was shaped differently so they had to be covered one at a time. The process is the same as the above.

 iced as smooth as possible so they are no lumps

 rolled in oblong shapes to cover pin

All three pins covered and smoothed

Decoration

Now this is when you take a simple looking cake and jazz it up and make it look nice. Placement was pretty easily determined. The space between the pins looked just right for the bowling balls so here is what that looked like.

 Add some finger holes and pin stripes, Happy 80th Birthday, and a rose and you have your self a cake.

The last addition was a perfect frame. I know not many people have done this but i thought shes had a great life and deserves it. The cake was a huge hit! Even some of her bowling friends where there and loved it.