Geometric Cakes: Tetrahedron, Triangles, Pyramids Cubes… and Joshua’s 18th Birthday.

Back in July, my oldest son Joshua celebrated his 18th birthday. I mentioned the other day that my son Caleb is my “easy” child – always laid back and easy to please. Joshua is the opposite – at least when it comes to his birthday cakes.

He almost always asked for more complicated cakes – he says he likes to “challenge me”. What he means is he likes to give me more gray hairs 😉  I’m thinking back to his previous birthdays and wow… I think he hit the nail on the head when he said Geometry was his favorite math in school! Geometric Cakes: Tetrahedron, Triangles, Pyramids, Cubes – I’ve done them all for him!

But I love him, so I do my best!! Even though he is pretty crazy. And fun!

Isn’t he a good looking kid? I’m so, so very proud of him!

Wanna see his other birthday cakes? One year he asked for Little Big Planet. I think that was his 14th birthday and I don’t think I had done a round (ball) cake before that. It wasn’t all that great, but that was really my first full year of cake decorating. More pics HERE.

Last year he asked for a Minecraft cube. With the “correct” number of pixels. I used Satin Ice Brown and Green fondant and cut a million tiny little squares (okay – so it was more like 1000, but still) until I had done what my boy wished for. Oy. I’m realizing as I write this post that this is yet another (of hundreds) cake that I haven’t yet written about. But there you go…

This was his 17th birthday. Love him so much! And he’s grown 6 inches since then:

(taken at the Grand Canyon from our vacation this summer – one month before his 18th birthday)

Anywho… for his 18th birthday, he wanted a tetrahedron cake. Having a math degree – I knew what it was – but I still looked it up to verify, that yes, he wanted a “polyhedron composed of four triangular faces, three of which meet at each corner or vertex.” In other words, it’s like a pyramid, but with a triangle shaped bottom instead of square.

His second choice was a “normal” tiered cake with cutout triangles in different colors. I told him I could definitely do that cake – and I did…

I even did it off-center and tried to make it really different for him. The techniques for doing the cutouts were similar to those taught in this Creative Cuts for Color Reveals Craftsy Class by Rachael Teufel.

It’s hard to tell in the pictures, but some of the triangles were cut out, some were smooth with the fondant, others were laid on top – to give it different dimensions. I didn’t have a lot of black fondant on hand, so I airbrushed white fondant for the black on this one, then used Satin Ice blue for the triangles.

Okay – so then… I made the decision to go for it on the Tetrahedron Cake. I figured why not? It was for my own child, so if I failed or screwed it up – it would be okay. He knew I was pretty anxious about trying it but he really, really wanted me to… so off we went!

And at the end of the day – it wasn’t too bad! I have had some bad luck with carving cake into intricate shapes (it falls apart, I cry, I have to start over, etc.), so I decided to go with brownies for this “cake”. It was much denser and less chance of it crumbling when I got down to carving those sharp points.

And it worked!! I used layer after layer of brownie, glued together with ganache and carved into an almost perfectly shaped tetrahedron. There was no way I was going to try to cover it in fondant, so I made panels of modeling chocolate. I used the same triangle cutter to cut out orange triangles to add the different dimensions.

Joshua loves geometry and “retro” and anything out of the ordinary. He also loves orange and blue and black 🙂  So those were his two cakes! This one is the one I was MOST excited about… and he  was too:

Can you see the cut pic up close?

The modeling chocolate on this one was also airbrushed – I had no idea if it would work or not – and honestly it stayed pretty “tacky” so I don’t necessarily recommend airbrushing chocolate, but it worked for us for this… so all was good!

So that’s that… Joshua’s Geometric Cakes!