Materials: Pink Insulation Foam, PermaIce, acrylic paint
Tools: Bandsaw, sandpaper, icing spatula, piping tips, plastic zip top bags/ piping bags
For a production of The Herd at Steppenwolf I was tasked with what is a pretty 'simple' food prop, it didn't need to do anything fancy, it just came out on a tray and no one touched it. I was given 3 instructions: It's chocolate, it needs balloons and it needs to say "Happy 21st Andrew" on it.
Unfortunately I didn't get any pre-frosting pictures, but I stacked two circles of insulation foam on top of each other and used FastBond Contact Adhesive to stick them together.
We didn't have our cake board (a cardboard or foil covered board that the cake sits on) yet, so I placed the cake onto a piece of wax paper to ice and pipe it, because the PermaIce doesn't stick to it.
A note about PermaIce: It's awesome and no longer available... however it looks like Deco-Frost is a similar product. However, spackle or acrylic caulk are much more cost efficient materials to use as icing as seen in Cakes ala David and One Last Herring Cake.
I tinted the PermaIce with acrylic paint and smeared it on with a spatula. I piped the edges using a star tip and had a TERRIBLE time because my PermaIce was... chunky (and old and a bit dried out) and kept getting stuck.
For the words, I used straight PermaIce and piped it onto the wax paper, so if I messed up, I could scrape the icing back into the bag (also a good way to practice!). I let the letters fully dry and then glued them on with white glue.
Balloons!
Cake balloons are usually solid icing, but I didn't want to attempt to pipe them, in the interest of time and effort. So I shaped them out of more insulation foam (after laying out how big they should be on this very fancy drawing I made).
Can you see my piping lines?
I then covered them in more PermaIce, tinted with more acrylic paints. I did this on wax paper and transferred it to the cake, just like I did with the letters. Because I had limited piping tips, I ended up using a small tip and 'filling in' the balloons, then smoothing it out before it dried. I also did a bit of sanding. Then I glued them down and added some tiny balloon strings.
And there we have it! I glued it to the cake board using hot glue and far as I know, it's still fully intact sitting in storage to this day. Happy Birthday/ Unbirthday everyone!
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