Banjo Cake

Hey – I did this a while ago before I was a blogger. I wish I had pictures of the process. It would be so much easier. The first thing to know is that my husband built the base out of wood. The base was a circle. Attached to that was a 90 piece that then attaches the wooden neck. The wooden base kind of looks like a frying pan in shape. I wanted to do it to scale, so I got actual dimension from banjo building sites like this one: http://thehub.musiciansfriend.com/folk-instrument-buying-guides/banjos-how-to-choose. I built up the neck a bit with rice crispies, which tend to mold easily to the shape you want. I then covered the neck in black fondant. The details are all cut out or molded from fondant or gum paste. Some of the fondant details were painted silver by combining edible silver decorating powder with either lemon juice or vodka. You then just paint the mixture on the white fondant. The cake was the head portion of the banjo. The “strings” were not edible. They were fishing wire. I took little pins and pinned them into the cake, and “strung” them down to the end. I wrapped those around my fondant pegs and may have pinned it in place down there. You can see, visually, how I just built up the fondant in layers and worked out the details. I hope that description is helpful. It was a lot of work, and it took a lot of attention to details. It’s so fun to create something like this though. let me know how it goes.