Ghost Cake

Every now and then you make a cake that you find so achingly beautiful that you want to take a gazillion pictures of it. This was one such cake. I made it for a lovely bride a few years ago and still do think that this is the prettiest cake that I ever made.

However, and there always is a however in such stories, I was also experiementing with my new camera and I simply could not manage to get a decent picture. The cake was made to be the cutting cake at a wedding and was accompanied by these cupcakes:

So, even if I say so myself, I managed to make pretty darn decent wedding cupcakes, exactly as the bride wished. I also spent an entire day making sugar roses out of florist paste and another afternoon piping around the cake delicately. It took me more than an hour to pipe around the cake and finally it was ready to be photographed. I really (really) wanted to take a good picture before I sent the cake away, I was almost emotionally attached to it. Anyway, I got the camera ready, ironed a bit of pink stripey fabric (ask any cake maker, we all have random bits of fabric in the house to act as a suitable backdrop) and got all excited about taking a picture. This is what hapenned:

I photographed a ghost cake. I kid you not. Fast forward to 2013 and I know that this is because my fancy DSLR camera’s ISO was set too high. See that? I just talked camera, me. I now know not to make such a mistake, and we will come back to food photography in a later blog post, but back then, I blamed the camera. I continued to take several pictures, each one ghostier than the other. Writing about it now seems funny, but I was breaking a sweat then, I simply could not take a decent picture. My cake was about to leave my home and there was not a single good picture!

Anyway, Mr. Bob Google came to the rescue, I fiddled with the camera settings and finally manged a good shot. This is what the cake actually looked like: