This cake was definitely one of those learning experience type projects for me. With the help of my sister-in-law, I made this cake for my mother-in-law's birthday this weekend. One of my mother-in-law's favorite hobbies is quilting so I wanted to surprise her with a quilt cake. I looked some up on the internet but I had trouble finding very many that were like the ones that she makes. She makes really nice like rustic type log cabiny quilts with earthy tones. I was mostly finding baby shower quilt cakes. But I did find one that gave me the idea for this and it also had some really dark purple in it. Her favorite color is purple so I wanted to incorporate that with the cake but still keep it sophisticated by making it a really dark plum or eggplant type purple. Well as you can see my plan did not quite work out how I wanted. I kept adding more and more purple coloring to the icing and it just kept getting more and more Barney looking. I tried adding some blue, not a good idea. So I looked up on the internet how to make plum color with Wilton icing. It said to mix purple with a little Christmas Red. Well I only had Red Red so I used it instead. This produced an okay color but definitely not the color I was trying for. Oh well.
So anyway, the cake is white cake that I iced in white first then used a toothpick to draw the squares. Then I iced certain squares certain colors. I had a drawing of how the actual pattern should be that we went by. My sister-in-law and I decided what other colors might look good. Since I only have the basic box of colors I really did not have the right colors to make the shades we wanted to make. We did discover that adding black to some of the colors produced a shade pretty close to what we were thinking. I put the purple on first then the green. Then I took a step back and thought, "this is looking a little clowny." So from there I just kind of felt like this cake was not turning out the way I had envisioned. We tried to make several more colors and none of them seemed to turn out right. So then we just kind of went for it and started decorating the different squares and this was the product. Not horrible but not anything like what I was thinking or trying for. Once the icing dried a little the colors darkened a bit and they did not look quite as bad as they did at first. My husband said that it looked good. My mother-in-law said she really liked it and most people had no problem figuring out that it was supposed to be a quilt. Also, I find that if you stand back and squint it really does look like a quilt. So that is good.
Some things I learned from this cake: sometimes it is necessary to buy special colors. I don't think my basic box of colors will do the trick for every cake. It is also necessary to do the research ahead of time on how to actually produce the colors you want, you really cannot just make it up as you go. I also realized after the fact that the squares with the white background needed to have a second layer of icing so they matched up with the other squares. I used a toothpick to make little stitch marks and I actually kind liked how that came out, I would do that again. I also think next time I will have a specific idea before hand what each square will look like and draw it out with color (I think I need to buy colored pencils) just to make sure that the contrast and areas of light and dark and all that look good. I think if I did a quilt cake again I could do it way better but this is a good first attempt and my mother-in-law was happy with it so that is all that matters. But I will be trying again.
