A Story

I learned early on in my clay career that patience is an important attribute for artists who work with polymer clay. I was super excited to try to make my very first cake, and I had just seen a video on You Tube in which a highly talented person from Sweden had made the most dainty little cake you can imagine. She had used a light green for the fondant and the cake was a creamy vanilla color with a vibrant strawberry filling. She had even crafted a tiny pink rose and a leaf to go on top.

            I thought I would make one that was my level of difficulty by leaving off the rose and leaf, and instead of hand-rolling the clay as she had done, opting to roll my clay through the pasta machine so that it would be a uniform thickness. I had a fair amount of confidence going into my project, all of which turned out to be completely artificial.

            It was all going quite smoothly. I had rolled out the clay and cut it into three circles, one for the filling, and two for the cake to go on either sides of it. I had decided to do a vanilla-colored cake too, but use a pastel purple for the fondant and a light pink for the filling. I stacked up the cake layers, and rolled out a sheet of clay for the fondant. This was where I encountered my first challenge.

            The clay I rolled out was too thick, so instead of effortlessly laying it over the top of the cake and letting fall smoothly around the cake as the You Tube person had done, my clay stuck out at odd angles like a duckling whose feathers are just coming in. As I tried to smooth it down, my excited fingers began to squash the cake in different places so that my cake went from an ugly duckling to the moon with its many craters. At any rate, it did not look like a cake.

            I finally managed to get the clay back into a cylindrical cake shape. Then I got tried to cut it, which was mistake number two. In addition to my blade being dirty, the clay was really warm from all my fiddling with it. This set up the perfect storm. As I tried to slice the cake, the combination of the warm, soft clay and the dirty blade made the cake smeared and deformed.

            I learned three things that day. One is that you should always make sure you have the right thickness of clay rolled out before you try to put on. Two is to always make sure your blade is kept clean. And three is that you should never try to cut clay while it is too warm.