Pots and Pans

This is a continuation of the Ratatouille posts, because as nice as all the little fondant figurines are, they're not actual cakes. And as much as I love snacking on some fondant scraps*, fondant will never be as delicious as cake is, because cake is just amazinggggggg <3
Obviously, Remy and the veggies were made to accessorize the cake, so here is the cake (or at least one of them) that goes with Remy and his entourage.

Every piece of art begins very humbly, and so does a cake. And here is the making of Ratatouille!!!!

*Ahem* drum roll please?

*Drum roll*

What? Isn't this good enough for you???

Sigh....

This is only step one guys.
This beauty (or not so much, he's a little plain still) has this delicious chocolate cream inside called brigadeiro. It's a Brasilian sweet made out of condensed milk and chocolate powder. It's delicious <3
There are two cakes, one stacked on top of the other with the brigadeiro in the middle. Then there's a smooth layer (sorta) of buttercream covering the cake. It's only a crumb layer so it doesn't have to be perfect.

After letting the cake rest for a while, allowing the icing to become a little more stable, I covered it with brown fondant. Now here's the thing about dark colors: they SUCK! It takes forever to make a dark shade of fondant. It requires a LOT of coloring, which usually paints your hands as well as the fondant. So making dark colors is never fun. Brown, red, dark green, purple, etc. They're all in that category. Black is too, but I cheat when it comes to black. I bought a tub of Duff's black fondant so I wouldn't have to spend 30 minutes and two little tubs of coloring every time I needed black (which surprisingly enough, is often). So I don't have to color the black =)
But the black isn't what's important right now, brown is. The same brown that was used to cover the cake, was also used to create the top of the pan. The brown got rolled into a long snake, then wrapped around the top of the cake, like this:

I know that this doesn't look very pan-like, but it will very soon. Because this isn't just an empty pan, it's a pan with food inside! So I put some yummy food** in there (:

All I did was throw some buttercream on top and gently smoothed it out*** with my spatula. Spongebob was right, spatulas really are magic!

Doesn't it look purty? (:
But unfortunately, no one wants to eat plain, white, creamy soup. So let's spice things up a bit. First ingredient....

Peas! Remember these guys? They finally made their way onto a cake (:
But as awesome as peas are,**** this stew is still looking a little bland to me... So let's chop up one of those big carrots we made in the beginning and toss them in there too.

There. That looks MUCH better (:
But it's still missing something... The stew looks edible, but our pan is still kinda iffy. It needs a handle.

And as much as I've been calling it a pan, it's really more of a pot. So the handles were short and stubby, like pot handles.

These were fairly simple. All I had to do was wrap the brown fondant around these plastic tubes, then tie them up in a way that they would make the shape I wanted. After drying overnight, I slipped them off the tubes and stuck them into the cake. But because of the way they were put in, instead of using gumpaste glue, I used icing to make them stick.

This is what the pot of stew looked like at the end (can you see the pieces of the board? Take it as a sneek peek into the next post ;D)

We are now one step closer to finishing the Ratatouille posts!
Next is the second cake that went with the set, then how I tied up the ensemble for the party. So stick around if you want to find out how it turned out!




*Only when there's no one looking cause it makes my mommy mad (;
**And by food, I mean buttercream
***Slightly, I left some ruffles to make it look natural
****Come on, have you seen Veggie Tales? The French Peas are the bomb! And of course, we are NOT, under any circumstances, allowed to eat cartoon characters. So no peas for dinner, ever again. Mwahaha. Take that mom (;