The Golden Snitch

My roommate finally turned twenty one and as with all birthdays, she needed a cake.  I decided for some input from friends of hers and after getting a suggestion to build her a replica of Hogwarts, something I didn't feel like attempting yet, I got a suggestion for a golden snitch.  This I believed to be more doable after having accomplished both the saturn cake (for sphere cakes) and the narwhal (for sugar design).  After an intense design session with my fellow birthday cake maker John, we sketched out some ideas and got supplies for the big day.

This was our inspiration.

I worked on the cake part of the cake.  The bottom is Styrofoam that we poked lollipop sticks in to make it easier to put the wings in later.  I layered the cake over the sticks as well.

Next, I carved the cake into the sphere shape and made a mess all over the table.

I then frosted the outside of the sphere starting with the cake and then moving to the Styrofoam to prevent the Styrofoam from getting into the cake, while allowing glue for the fondant to stick to both cake and Styrofoam.

 Since we could only find white fondant, I had to knead in food coloring into the fondant to get it closer to the golden color.

I rolled out the fondant to cover the cake.  Luckily, we had just enough to cover the whole thing, but the fondant was a little thinner than I would have preferred as a result.

Next, I covered the cake with the fondant.  Note: the funfetti in the foreground was a back up in case one of the layers turned out funny.  I did use yellow cake box mix for the actual cake, however, I would recommend using a cake that doesn't say "moist" in its description to make it easier to carve.

Next, we smoothed down the fondant to make it nice and spherical.

We added rolled up pieces of fondant for detail and pressed other details into the fondant.  Then John steamed it with his iron to make all the extra sugar melt to make it nice and shiny.  We added some luster dust to get it closer to its intended gold color and to also hide some tiny flaws in the fondant.

While I was working on the cake, John was making brooms and an owl out of chocolate to put on some cupcakes.

We used a blue food color spray to give the cupcakes a sky-like appearance for the brooms to fly riderless in.

He also got to do the sugar work.  He used two lollipop sticks to make it stronger and poured a sugar outline of the wing.

Next he drizzled sugar over the outline to make the filling of the wings.  This also helped keep the wings lighter.  After it cooled, we snapped off the excess sugar.

We assembled everything except the wings to make transport easier.

Here is the final product which delighted my roommate immensely.