Weight lifter Cake Decorating and Baking Tutorial

Paul starts off by showing us how to make the frame for the figure to molded around using 20 gauge wire, florist tape and a bamboo skewer. He uses a drawing he made of his figure to as a reference for making the frame which makes it a lot easier. It is all very straight forward as you will see. Paul also shows us how to make to the bolt for the weights which again is very easy and all you need is circle cutters, a rolling pin and a knife…oh and some black sugarpaste. For the numbers for the weights Paul uses a tap letter cutter and finds in the ned that the most effective way to use it is as follows…Roll out your flower paste to approx 2mm, rub a little icing sugar over it and then push the tap cutter into it and then lift without wiggling. You should then easily be able to lift the excess flower paste from it. For the large numbers Paul created his own templates from paper and then cut around them from orange flower paste and left them to dry in front of an open oven at 200 degrees celsius.

For the full tutorial see the Weightlifter cake

In this lesson Paul shows us how to make the torso of the figure using 50/50 of brown teddy bear brown sugarpaste and modelling paste. He uses a picture of a manakin as a reference and shapes the body with his hands and adds details such as pectorals and abdominal muscles with a small ball tool and a leaf veining tool. Don’t spend too much time on this part as when you shape it around the wire frame and get rid of the join mark you will lose a lot of the detail but the lines will remain. This enables to you to shape it back to how you had it.

Paul starts of by rolling out a sausage of the same 50/50 paste as used for the body and then cuts it in half to then be shaped into the arms. This is a fairly bullet proof way of making sure both the arms are the same size. As before you will be having to do a lot of reshaping once you start putting them on the wire frame so don’t be too precious about them at first.

Paul starts off by inserting the frame into the tip of the cake. To create the whole and keep everything food safe he pushes in a large posy pick which he leaves in and then stuffs in some sugarpatse so that the frame has something to go into. For the head Paul rolls out of ball of the same paste and makes it into a kind of egg shape with accentuated cheeks. Later in the tutorial he decides that they are perhaps a little too big and reshapes it slightly. It’s always the same….when you look again with fresh eyes there’s always something you want to change but that’s a good thing.

For the hair Paul uses a mixture of brown and yellow sugarpaste which creates a nice light brown colour. He starts off by adding hair to the sides and back of the head and builds it up by making tiny little sausage and marking them with lines and adding to the head with a little glue. For the top of the head he makes them a little bigger and puts them on flat and flicks them at the end to create a nice stick up fringe. He then dusts his cheeks with rose petal dust and paints on eyebrows with some brown paint.

First of all we need to get that barbell that the figure is holding to look a little more realistic and what better for the job than some silver paint? Two coats will do nicely so go back to it later once it has dried. For the small weights to go on either end paul uses grey sugarpaste with some CMC added to it and uses three different circle cutter to create the sizes. He secures them on with a little glue once he has pierced a hole through the middle of them all. Again they will need a coat of silver paint so you could maybe paint them before adding them. Remember when attaching the hand to make sure the thumb goes under the barbell and not over it. Now it’s on to dusting the figure to add definition to the body. Paul uses a mixture of red and brown dust.