A good friend of mine challenged me to make a fancy fondant cake with a poker theme for her friend's 35th birthday. I've always been very reluctant to work with fondant as I don't particularly enjoy the taste or texture, but it really is a great medium for creative work on cakes. It was a lot of fun to work on this cake; it reminded me of making plastisine figurines in elementary school.
The cake inside is a moist chocolate cake layered with a rich vanilla buttercream frosting. I've discovered this amazing buttercream recipe from the Flour cookbook that is a cross between Swiss and American buttercream. You heat the whites and sugar mixture over a bain marie, whip that into a stiff meringue, add butter and then icing sugar. It is absolutely delicious!
The cards and poker chips were all made with fondant, I simply added a bit of tylose powder to make them a bit stiffer and made them a couple days in advance so they had time to harden properly. Apparently you can order edible playing cards online or through different bakeries, or even make your own with a special printer using edible ink. Unfortunately, I didn't have any of those luxuries so I had to go with the more simple designs for the playing cards - I think a perfect replica of the Queen of Spades may be a bit beyond my time constraints, not to mention abilities. The symbols on the cards were all drawn free-hand using edible markers.
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