Quilled Mini Cake

I saw a quilled gold fish cake on CakeCentral a couple of days ago and it looked SO pretty I HAD to try it and it so happened that we were going to Penang this weekend (And I have a mad hatter tea party appointment with Basil Beauregard! So I already thought of making a tiny cake a while back and I just came across this quilling technique, Perfect!) , so I had the perfect opportunity to try out this quilling technique with gum paste.  

Oh and to make the cake even more fun I colored the yellow cake batter BLUE and once it was baked it came out turquoise! Yippee! (That was supposed to be a surprise but never mind..!)

Once I had the cake covered with fondant I decided the white background was a little too plain and I had TONS of Squire's Kitchen food paint.

I had a rather hard time choosing the colors since they didn't really label the colors as I expected.

For instance, white is edelweiss and there is wisteria, nasturtium (I can't even pronounce this thing!), gentian, cyclamen etc! Scary!

I went with some daffodil, sunflower, rose, pink and lilac.

Then painted the white fondant a bit.

After a while the cake got a bit bumpy (I think you can see that in the photo!), I wonder what happened... 

I did everything free-hand (Without poking holes/ sketching on the cake first.) but I did copy some parts from a very pretty (But I made it prettier with a few personal fantasy bird touches!) quilled dove I found on the net.  

   

Since I have NEVER done quilling with paper before but I did read a book on quilling once so I guess I knew quite a bit of basics.

Everything was different if you used fondant instead of paper so the things I knew was no help!

Oh and at the starting I found rolling it up with out squishing it and sticking it on was tougher than ANY string work I have EVER done, my hands were rather shaky!   

So the first hour or so was full of errors then everything went smoothly for the next 4! (It was a on a 6" cake so I had to make everything extra tiny! Ugh. I can't imagine doing more gum paste quilling!)

Okay that should be about it for the quilled cake, I also completed another cake today:

What a tiring caking day!

~K