TUFT: A fruitcake tutorial.

December 25, 2008
"TUFT: The Ultimate Fruitcake Tutorial"
(but that was too many letters for dA to handle )

Fullview, it's better
(It's only 829 KB, so it won't kill your internet.)

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First off, a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

Project Fruitcake in all its completed glory.
After around 30 hours total of slaving around in the kitchen during December, including 8 hours of baking, 10 hours of marzipanning and 12 hours of decorating, I'm finally done.

I'd say this project cost me about $80, including the tin and other tools/colours I bought especially for this project.

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This tutorial/step-by-step was going to be three parts, but then Photoshop got wiped from my computer (nobody told me!) so I lost the other part of this...

I downloaded the trial version and decided I'd just make one big whopper of a tutorial.

The cool purple background was made by using the gradient tool, and me mucking around because I didn't exactly know how to use it.

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Notes about construction:
Only 30 cakes are used in the final shot. (I actually had 31 in the end.) There are 16 on the bottom, 9 on the second layer, 4 on the third layer and one on top. There should be 20 red ones, but considering I only had 19, there is a green one hidden in the bottom tier.

To get the red icing to that colour takes a very long time. Red is one of the most annoying icing colours to work with. The green took not nearly as long, but it had a blueish sort of tone for ages. The colours I used were Wilton's "No Taste Red" and Chefmasters' "Forest Green", which the cake deco shopkeeper told me was close to a holly green colour.

(I was endeavouring to get pre-coloured fondant, but it's only avaliable in America and apparently didn't meet our safety standards...so it can't be imported )

I used a total of 1kg of Orchard almond icing and about 1.5kg of Orchard ready-to-roll fondant. The cake itself weighs about 2.5kg and the whole finished product was nearly 4kg.
The cakes are on a round glass display plate, I was out of square cake boards that were large enough, plus I think it looks nicer on the round plate.

That's all I can think of right now, any other queries, please leave a comment