I made a set of Mahjong tile cakes for my friend.
The most challenging part was cutting
and making sure all the cakes were the same size. I was at the cake
store recently and saw the rectangular cake dividers and didn't buy it,
yep I was kicking myself for that! Took me about two hours to cut all 14
cakes and ice them. I had to make sure they were all the same size and
all the angles were perpendicular. If any one of them were slanted, it
would be obvious.
I made vanilla cake with vanilla
buttercream. A good way to see if your cakes are the same size is to
use the negative space left from the cake board. I made sure the silver
border was roughly half an inch on all four sides. The 14 cakes were not
the same height so I used buttercream to add a bit of height to some of
them to make them all the same.
To make sure the angles are all
perpendicular, I had to freeze the cake after each buttercream coating,
this took most of the two hours.
I rolled out the white fondant and
covered each tile. When you're working with a square/rectangular cake,
always smooth out the corners first.
Trim away the excess fondant and
smooth it with the fondant smoother. When you work with
square/rectangular cakes, it's easier to smooth the cake with two
smoothers.
I made some green fondant with Leaf
Green edible colouring, rolled it out (thinner than the white fondant)
and cut it with the ribbon cutter.
I attached it to the cake with water.
You can see there isn't much of the silver cake board border left. Be
very careful when you place the cakes together in the box after, I had
two of them touching and I had to redo the green layer.
All 14 are covered with fondant and ready to be painted!
You only get one shot at this, so don't
make a mistake lol. I'm Chinese but I never had to write Chinese
characters.. so this was super difficult! I've had to paint Chinese
characters for other cakes before,. This is what I do...I paint the
character with a thin line and then go back and thicken the line where
it needs to be thickened as if you're the character was painted with a
brush.. think of the character as a picture, and try to center it by
looking at the negative spaces.
Okay so I did the easiest character
first to warm up lol. It's probably best to do the hardest one now and
get that over with lol. This is the 'love' character. Thank goodness I
didnt make a mistake. (I should've made an extra cake incase I did
though!)
Okay so I did the easiest character
first to warm up lol. It's probably best to do the hardest one now and
get that over with lol. This is the 'love' character. Thank goodness I
didnt make a mistake. (I should've made an extra cake incase I did
though!)
Here's all of them together :) So instead of the usual tiles for the 'pair of eyes', my friend wanted to use the character 'love'. So sweet!
That's my blackberry on the table to
show the size of the cakes. My friend thought they would each be the
size of the actual tile lol, I made them way too big haha.
