Banjo Cake Armature Design

Last week I showed you guys the awesome banjo cake I made for Rachel and Daniel's wedding.  They were thrilled with the cake; I even heard from the bridal planner that they wouldn't allow the cake to be cut!  They took the whole thing home with them without a scratch on it!  That's the way I like to think all my cakes go over.  I HATE seeing pictures of my cakes after they have been fed upon!!

Anyhoo, back to the design of  banjo armature.  I wanted this cake to look as much like a banjo as possible and as little like a cake as possible.  Even though it would mean more inedible pieces, I wanted the neck to be "floating", I wanted to use real guitar strings, and I didn't want a visible cake board.

In the picture above, I have removed the neck from the armature and screwed 6 small eye screws into the bottom of the banjo.  These will hold the strings.  The bottom cake is om the armature.  I included the thickness of the cake board into my design so that the banjo would keep it's scale and since it was the same size as the cake (14"), you would never know there was a cake board.  Even though the cake actually only measures 1.25 inches thick, I decided to put in some supports because I didn't want ANY shifting or sinking.  The cake above has it's basic decoration already done, which was a block modeling chocolate top with a wood grain modeling chocolate wrap around the sides.

This is the 2nd tier of the banjo, which is a 12 " cake.  It is sitting on a very thin cardboard round.  I cut out the holes for the armature.  Once it was on the cake I had to fill in the bottom with just a smidge of modeling chocolate to fully round out the bottom.  From there, it got a similar coating as the bottom tier.  White on the top with a gray wrap around the sides.  The neck could then be attached and then the details could be added.  Here's one more shot of the completed cake, just in case you missed it last week!

Have a great week!