In this post I am going to share with you my experience using my Cricut Cake machine for the very first time. I am in no way a professional, but I have created cakes before and I have taken all three Wilton Cake Decorating Classes at Michaels. This cake was created for my nephew's second birthday which had a Disney Cars theme. If you want to look at my post which contains the two Cars cards I made for him, you can check them out by clicking here.
Tip#1: Duff's Cake mix may be expensive, but it is by far the best tasting store-bought cake mix I have ever tried. It is extremely moist and very delicious. Doesn't even compare to the cheaper $1 or $2 more popular cake mix brands. I purchased the 2 boxes at Michael's with 40% off coupons.
Tip#2: I used both Duff's fondant and Wilton fondant. I bought the 5 lb white Wilton fondant (with a 40% off coupon at Michaels) as well as two tubs of Duff's fondant. While Duff's fondant tastes a little better, the better value is the Wilton package. The only con is that you have to do some of the dying yourself...but that's where my patient and strong muscular husband came in handy ;) Here's the important part: make sure your fondant is fresh. I decided to try using some tightly packaged and air tight sealed fondant that I had saved and was leftover from a previous project, however, it must have lost some of the moisture because when the Cricut Cake machine was cutting it, the edges of the cut were crackled and not smooth.
Tip#3: Prior to "guesstimating" how large your want your cut to be using fondant (and avoiding any loss of cake materials), cut it out on paper first (as I did pictured below, using my Cricut expression), then place it on top of your cake to see if it is a good size for your cake!)
Picture of the bottom layer cake, Duff's Chocolate cake.
Tip#4: Prior to cutting your fondant, place it in the freezer for approximately 5 minutes or until hard. You will especially want to do this if you are food colouring your own fondant because with all the kneading, the fondant eventually becomes warm and will start to stick to your hands. If this happens, simply stop the kneading for a few minutes until the fondant hardens again.
Tip#5: As you can see from the picture above (look carefully!), the bottom of the cake is not even. My priority was to line up the top of the cake since I wanted it to be a clean cut all the way around. To hide the uneven-ness, I placed a tip#21 on my baggie and piped a shell border all the way around the base of the cake. A perfect way to hide all the imperfections!
I used Cricut Boys Will Be Boys cartridge for the font and used the shadow feature, since the regular font is a bit too slim for fondant.
I had originally tried using the Cricut Cake Frosting Sheets for the red part of Lightening McQueen. However, when I tried applying water to the back of the cut with my brush, I accidentally applied way too much water and the cut fell apart and got soggy extremely fast.
Tip#6: When using Cricut Cake Frosting Sheets, change your speed settings to a slow speed. If you watch my video, you will see that when I initially tried cutting the sheets, my speed was way too fast and the sheets started chipping and crumbling.
Lastly, a quick video!
Hope this post was helpful and enjoyable!
