Happy 2014! New Year's Blog Tutorial

Hi everyone! I'm sorry, I'm down to the wire on this one. ;0)

Today, I'm going to share my easy New Year's Cake with you, which is carved from a simple one layer 9x13 sheet cake. (If you need more servings, make a two layer sheet or go larger...this is an easy design to change up!)

First, I created a template by tearing off a sheet of parchment paper the size of my cake. I played around with the size of the numbers until the spacing was right, and cut it out. This is what I used as my carving guide. I'm going to link to my template to save you a few minutes. This is a two part template. Just print, cut out, and lay on the cake!: PART 1 and PART 2.

I used a doctored cake mix for this to increase the density a bit. Denser cakes stand up best to carving. Use whatever recipe you'd like, but the recipe that I used is "White Almond Sour Cream Cake", as found HERE. I also like to freeze my cakes before carving to reduce the number of crumbs. This is optional, but it helps!

I frosted my cake with a coat of vanilla buttercream.

I often use the "Viva" method for smoothing but I was out of Viva paper towels! So, I used my next favorite method for smoothing--the hot knife method. I chilled my frosted cake just until the icing was firm, and then smoothed over it with a very hot spatula...adding fresh icing here and there.

You can see above that I have a cardboard cake board beneath my cake. All of my cakes have a cake board so that I can easily move them to their their base or platter later. With this cake, I used an xacto knife to cut the board down to the size of the cake. I didn't bother cutting away the narrow space between the "1" and "4", but aside from that it was easy to follow the lines of the cake.

I used a toothpick to define our numbers...we'll use these lines as a guide in a few minutes. (By the way, I moved my cake to a cake base which is two stacked cake boards covered with a black plastic tablecloth.)

I filled in a few holes (in the "4" and "2") with black sugar pearls to define them. I also rolled a long snake of (pre-colored) red Satin Ice fondant to outline what will soon become a clock on top of our "0". I use a few fondant accents on this cake but all could be easily substituted with buttercream piping. I placed a gold dragee in the center of our clock. We'll add fondant numbers and hands later!

Below, you can see that our "1" is wearing a tuxedo (fondant bow tie with buttercream buttons). Our "4" has a party hat with red fondant stripes and buttercream fringe which was piped with a grass piping tip.

More accents-- I attached a piece of tinsel around a lollipop stick with a piece of floral wire. I pushed the stick into the cake as an anchor, and this will give our party hat a fun gold pom pom on top. Alternatives could be buttercream piped with a grass tip, or you could fringe a narrow strip of paper and wrap it around the tip of a lollipop stick for a similar look ;0)

You can also see more of the clock below. The numbers are fondant, cut with tappit cutters, and our "1" now is wearing a cummerbund (which is just a rectangle of black fondant with a couple of horizontal impressions made with my knife)

We are almost finished!! Our "2" is very boring up until now. I made a champagne template placed on top of my fondant (tinted Wilton leaf green). I let it set up for a few minutes until I could pick it up easily without worry of distorting. I used a food coloring pen to outline it, and gave it a fondant label. Then I placed the bottle on my "2", and piped swirls of buttercream with a Wilton tip 2.

I added a few sugar pearls to my swirls on my "2", and then as a final touch, added the clock's hands (thin pieces of fondant) and sparkling sugar all over. We are finished!!

Finally, I used a Wilton tip 2 to outline my numbers, and for fun I piped a vertical line on the bottom half of my "1" for the look of white pants ;0) Then, I used a Wilton tip 21 to create a shell border around the bottom.

Ready to see the final cake? Looks like a party! ;0)