After finishing as first runner up in Season One Episode 8 of Cake Wars we were contacted by the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan to create a grand cake for their 100th anniversary of the Gold Award. The Gold Award changed its name 6 times over the last 100 years so the cake was designed to have 6 tiers. Each tier is dedicated to a specific time period, the name of the award and certain events the Girl Scouts were involved in during that time. Yavonkia Jenkins, Director of Communications for the Girl Scouts of Southeastern Michigan sent us pages and pages of information for each tier. We had to comb through it and determine the best topics to represent in fondant and sugar.
The bottom tier (a 28″ round) had 7 linear feet to cover and this was the tier with least amount of information. We had only one paragraph so we picked out a train and semaphore flag system that spells out “Golden Eaglet”. We also decided that this would be the best tier to put the Girl Scout logo and the Girl Scout pledge.
The top tier (an 8″ round) had the most amount of information but the least area to cover. So we picked out the space shuttle Challenger and an astronaut to represent the first woman who walked in space (who was also an active Girl Scout member). We included two elements from the original Cake Wars cake….the raccoon in the tree and a girl peeking out of a tent. We thought it was important for people to understand what they were looking at so we incorporated paragraphs of information hand piped in royal icing to help explain.
Many, many hours of work went into this cake. Not only did Yavonkia Jenkins have to do research but we did as well. For example, the New York World’s Fair in 1939. The first thing that came into our minds was a ferris wheel, big top tent, cotton candy and popcorn but when we looked up New York World’s Fair 1939 we got very different images. The ferris wheel was left on the drawing board.
The cake stands at 65″ tall and is covered in 40 pounds of fondant. We rented a U Haul moving truck to deliver it to the San Marino Club. The artists who worked on the cake are Laura Amodeo, Taylor Soulliere and Kelsey Motoligin.