How to Make a Shoe Cake with Minimal Swearing!

Those of you who follow me on Twitter will know that I spent last week cursing and muttering under my breath as I made my way through a mammoth cake carving event that was my Radley Bag and Shoe Cake. I have been meaning to do a post on cake carving for some time so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity.

Cake decorating has come a very long way since the days of round cakes topped with delightful 1970′s looking hand painted plaques! There is so much new equipment available and many new techniques. My favourite modern style of cake has the be the novelty cake, that is a cake that is carved and shaped to look like something else. So, when I received a commission for an anniversary cake with a Radley handbag and a pair of shoes I was thrilled. The handbag was no problem but I must admit the shoes were more of a challenge!

As with all carved cakes the most important thing is to get the cake right in the first place. You must use a dense sponge recipe such as a Madeira cake or a rich chocolate cake with real chocolate in it. Even then, if you need to carve any detailed shapes it is always best to freeze the cake thoroughly, removing it from the freezer an hour before you need it. Cake freezes really well and the process actuall helps the keep the cake moist for longer so there is no loss of quality when freezing.

The base of the shoes, a 10″ madiera cake split in two and frozen

 The next stage was to carve the shoe shape from the cakes. I use paper templates to ensure I have the correct proportions and then work from photographs to get the finer details right. It’s important with a ‘pair’ of cakes to get them the same so always carve both cakes before you start to cover them. This was it is a lot easier to see if they are the same size. Once the carving was done each cake was covered in a layer of buttercream. I don’t recommend filling a cake like this as the two layers will tend to move around as you try to cover them.

The carved cakes - you can see how I have had to build up the tongue area of the shoe with offcuts.

I now had two shoe shaped cakes and a big pile of offcuts. By the way, never throw out your offcuts – you can make yummy cake pops or cake truffles with them (but that’s for another post). This is the stage where you have to have a bit of faith as the cakes often look weird without the detail. The next stage was to start covering the cakes. I decided to do this as if I were making a shoe out of leather and built up the icing in sections using the photographs as a guide. Getting the pieces in the right order is important to ensure that you don’t have any joins showing in the wrong places!

The layers being built up

I added the embossed stitching and eyelets as I added each layer to ensure that I didn’t cause any cracking by working on fondant that had started to dry. The tongue was propped up with a small piece of sponge to stop it drooping whilst it dried. Once all of the layers had dried I made the laces with a dark brown fondant softened with a little trex using my sugar shaper (my favourite cake tool and worth it’s weight in gold).

Nearly there now!

At this stage, although the shoes look the right shape, they needed a little something to lift them and stop them looking so flat. This is where dusting colours come in to add shade and tone.

This photo shows what a difference a little carefully applied dusting colour makes.

Once I was happy with the colour I left the cakes for 24hours to allow the fondant to dry thoroughly so that I could lift the shoes and place them on the prepared cakes board. Once on the board I used my trusty sugar shaper again to make the soles, sticking them around the base of the shoe up to the heel, then adding a heel using black strips of sugar paste cut with a ribbon cutter to keep them even.

And here we have it – the finished shoes!

By comparison the Radley Bag was so easy I didn’t take any in progress photographs but it was made in much the same way, building the fondant up in parts with the joins where they would appear on a real handbag. I had fun with the detail on this cake, even plaiting three strands of icing to make the little leather zip tab!

Radley Bag detail with the famous Radley dog.

This was easily 15 hours of work including the baking and research. The customer was thrilled with it and I’ve had such lovely comments on Twitter and Facebook that it made it all worthwhile in the end! Having said that I’m quite please that my next shoe cake will be a LouBoutin stiletto made from gumpaste – easy in comparison