Midnight Mayhem themed cake

Another 21st birthday appears and I was approached to make a birthday cake themed Midnight Mayhem. The theme of the party was blacks, dark blues, silver and white, a reason to party hard into the the night. With those cues, and some things that the birthday boy and girl wanted , I created a Midnight Mayhem themed cake.

I wanted to use my new topsy turvy cake tin, and this was my first ever tiered cake.

Notes:

• A topsy turvy cake is hard to make look topsy turvy. If you don't get certain heights, or angles, it just looks like a crooked cake.
• A tiered cake is time consuming, and I only used one cake recipe and had a topsy turvy cake tin. In most topsy turvy cakes, each tier has a different flavoured cake, and several different sized cakes are made to obtain the topsy turvy look.
• Cutting dowels to size and placing them through an entire cake is quite hard when you are going through layers of fondant, ganache and cake.
• Rolling small balls of fondant is extremely tedious, probably won't ever do that for a cake trimming again. (Even with a friends help, it was tedious and time consuming)
• I bought cake boards to sit underneath the cakes when covering with ganache and fondant, but removed the two smaller cake boards when assembling the cake.
• The smaller cake board was used to measure the circle for the clock.
• Edible paint is fun and easy to use. (Wear glovers, or else fingers become sparkly with gold or silver)
• I used various sized cutters for my decorations (cats, bats, stars, moon). Most purchased from Glass House cakes: http://www.glasshousecakes.com.au/
• The Thunder Cake recipe was made 4 times!!!
• 900ml thickened cream, 600g milk chocolate (2 and a half blocks), 250g dark chocolate (1 block) for ganache. Of this remains approximately 2 cups.
• To get a midnight blue colour: 
• 2x 750g blue fondant
• 100g black fondant
• 100g red fondant100g black
• (All Bakels Brand). Those are rough estimations, I kind of winged it to get the desired colour.

The Decorations:

  The fondant balls kind of looked like mochi

The Cakes:

The Assembly:

I did a rough calculation and this entire cake took roughly 21 hours, this was spread over three days and includes fondant colour prep, decorations, baking, cleaning time and assembling the cake. It was definitely a learning experience, and I now know how to make it better for next time. The birthday boy and girl were extremely happy with how the cake turned out and said 'it turned out a lot better than expected'. Thanks guys! xx

Good food, good times!