Romantic Geode Cake

This cake was for a couple that I know. They have a long-distance relationship across two continents. For the short time when they were together, I wanted to celebrate their time together by making them a cake. I asked their favorite flavor: chocolate. And their favorite colors: blue and red.

I started out by stacking two six-inch square layers of vegan chocolate cake with chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream. I made the buttercream by adding 200g of melted dark chocolate to a batch of Swiss meringue buttercream. It was heavenly. Then, before I frosted the cake, I cut a heart-shaped hole out of one side of the cake. And I frosted it really carefully around the funny-shaped hole.


 And I cleaned up my cake board.
 Then, I marbled white fondant with a bit of blue fondant and a long squirt of blue food coloring. I marbled them together until it got to this point and rolled it out.
 The color distributed quite a bit while rolling it out and I draped it over the cake.
 I carefully smoothed the fondant onto the cake, making sure to get it into all the irregular grooves. Then I cut off the excess fondant and trimmed it close to the cake.
 I loved this spot on the marbling. I decided to emphasize it.
 But first, the next step was to fill the heart with rock candy. Rock candy does exist in Germany, although it's not quite the same thing. It's more like what I've heard called sugar diamonds. They're called Kandis in German and are only brown or white and are rounded on the edges. I pounded them into smaller pieces as well as I could. They're harder to break than you think. I started with the larger pieces and just stuck them in the heart with edible glue.
 Then I filled in with smaller pieces of broken Kandis to fill in the heart.
 I used some larger pieces to make a border around the bottom of the cake.

I dabbed red food coloring mixed with alcohol into the heart. Later I mixed a touch of white in with the red to make it more opaque. I also mixed gold luster dust with clear alcohol and painted around the heart and the border candy as well as a few lines to emphasize the marbling on the surface. I should mention that Kandis soaked up the alcohol-based paint like nobody's business. I had a hard time getting any paint on the underlying fondant.
But I really love how it turned out. I think the heart is really obvious and the red food coloring made it look more romantic.
I love the gold streaks in the marbling and along the bottom. It really brings it all together.
This cake was a new experience for me, but super fun and helped me to learn something new.






To watch the whole process on our YouTube channel, click here: https://youtu.be/6pGhrQs9O3c
Um das ganze Prozess auf YouTube anzuschauen, klickt hier: https://youtu.be/lHHoRpNvBjo

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