Cake Decorating with Meringues and other Candies: Picture Post

This picture post is dedicated to a fairly haphazard birthday cake I made quite a while ago with a mashup of recipes I no longer remember and under circumstances where many things went wrong! For instance, I use the word "meringues" loosely, since those were definitely a failed experiment...!

I do remember that this batter had tons of cocoa powder and involved coffee. This cake was enormous; I had three decently sized layers and a mountain of cream cheese frosting going into it.

The plan was to try to decorate the top with lavender meringues; however, I had no experience with meringues and clearly did not follow any recipes closely enough, ending up with these strange round candies. However, I was kind of a big fan of the colorful bubbles that resulted - don't they have a really sweet, seafoam-like appeal??

I definitely snacked on these throughout while deciding how I would involve them in decorating. I ultimately chose to separate out some nice-looking, small-ish round ones, and to crumble up a bunch as well to throw around the intact ones.

Not shown: 1) Chopping up a bunch of Heath bars to add to the decorate topping mix, and 2) My top tier starting to crumble as I worked to frost the behemoth. Luckily, I had enough frosting to correct the strange slope in structure, at least from an outside, aesthetic perspective - somebody definitely got a slice that had more frosting then cake, though!

The final product! I definitely would have loved to smooth the frosting out more at the top, but the structural integrity was in question, so I had focused on doing what I could to round out the sides and then throwing the decorations on top ASAP so I could stick the giant into the refrigerator to set!

I'm still overall fairly pleased with the outcome - it's definitely one of my cleanest frosting jobs yet. Plus - the layers actually came out really nicely for most of the cake! I definitely had to take a break from big cakes for a while after this, though - just carrying this cake to the office was a definite chore!