What an amazing weekend of cake-making, cake-viewing, and even cake-eating! The NCACS was a huge success and I had even more fun than last year. I have a few hundred pictures to share, so I will do so over a series of posts. Now I head back to the kitchen with a head full of fresh inspiration.

One of our new initiatives this year was “Cake Tours.” I had so much fun walking people through the TWO cake rooms that I thought I would walk you all through a handful of techniques and fun styles. These are cakes from across the different skill levels and categories. A full set of photos will eventually be available on www.cakeshow.org.

The special theme for 2010 was “nursery rhymes” and this working clock calls out to both Hickory Dickory Dock and Hey Diddle Diddle.  To the left you can see the four and 20 blackbirds baked in a pie.

These little monkeys jumping on the bed are awesome. I love that they are reading a copy of Jumping 101. In the bottom left corner (as well as next tot he pie above) you can see snapshots of the cake before it was covered in fondant. This is required for any sculpted pieces to show that they can actually be made out of cake.

You know what else if fun? Counting! You can count this pirate treasure made isomalt jewels (a special kind of sugar) and chocolate coins. These coins are not the little foil-wrapped kind! They are individually molded and painted an edible gold. The tricks here are in the details.

Do you need some counting practice? Try a few rounds of animal hopscotch.

And those were not the only animals on the loose. These guys escaped from Madegascar. An armature of some kind is wrapped with fondant and/or chocolate to provide a stable tree for this cake plane. 

Great details on these critters.

And they weren’t the only plane crash to make an appearance. On this cake many of the scenes were hand painted onto the cake with gel food coloring.