Nancy made these for the birthdays of our good friends Liz and her marathon-manic husband Tom. The cakes (top photo!) are replicas of Liz’ and Tom’s running shoes (bottom). Liz’ cake is chocolate with a chocolate caramel ganache filling and frosting. Sooo good! Tom’s is an apple cake, made from home-made apple sauce, with a caramel swiss meringue buttercream filling and frosting. Although this cake reminds me of fall with its cinnamon and nutmeg, it was perfect – even in February – for a guy who loves apples and apple pie.
Although these cakes were only slightly larger than life size, they were time consuming because of all the carving and the detail work involved in decorating.
Ever wonder what goes into making a cake like this? Here are some photos showing progress at different points in time (the first photo is from Liz’ cake, and the others from Tom’s, but the process for both was the same.) Both cakes started out as made-from-scratch sheet cakes which were cut into a shoe-shape using a hand-drawn template…
…Next each layer was covered with the frosting as it was added on to the cake, and then the resulting multi-layer cake was carved into a shape that resembled a running shoe using a big serrated knife…
…And finally the outside was covered with a layer of delicious frosting, making the cake ready to be covered with fondant. Fondant is an edible sugar dough that is roughly the same consistency as Play-dough, and it gives cakes a polished appearance. In the photo on the left, Tom’s shoe already has a thin piece of grey fondant on it, making the top part of the shoe’s tongue. The hole where the foot goes into the shoe is covered with a piece of black fondant. At this point, a lot of work had already gone into this cake, but there still was a lot more decorating to be done! 
And here is Tom’s shoe, all finished! Notice that the shoe has texture that mimics the mesh on the actual shoe, as well as stitching marks similar to the ones on the real shoe. Getting the details right is the key to making a cake like this look realistic! I can’t resist an opportunity for a pun, so I’ll just go ahead and say it: Liz and Tom both got a real “kick” out of their respective cakes!