Thanks for the replies guys!
The comments were very much appriciated!
Odessa, I'm not really a professional, though I have done the odd couple of cakes for money in the past! I am just finishing uni now (in the UK), and don't have plans to persue a career in cake decorating particulaly. However I like that it's something I can keep doing through my life, and if I ever find myself stuck for a job/money, there's always people who want cake!
I really enjoy it, and through uni have enjoyed making cakes as presents for people, I'm not sure if doing it for money would be quite as satisfying!
Here is one of my old cake threads on here:
www.dance.net . . .
I wrote a basic 'how I did it' guide on a similar post on the ballet board, so I'll stick it in here too in case you ever fancy giving it a go!
I'l give you a quick run down on how I did it- it was actually quite easy, and I'd love to see any attempts!
The basic shape was a rectangle and quite deep baking tray and I made a chocolate cake in it.
When baked and cooled, I cut the rectangle in half length-ways, leaving me with two letter box shaped cake pieces.
I shaped each cake piece into a pointe shoe shape using a very sharp knife. I made sure that there were no sharp edges to the cake by shaving off the corners with the knife where necessary. I also hollowed out the bit where your feet go in to about half way down from the top of the shoe to the sole. I also tried to shape the shoe a bit curvy towards the back where the heel would go, to give the effect of the floppy back of a pointe shoe with no foot in.
I wrapped each shoe in a rolled out piece of white sugarpaste/roll out icing which had been briefly brushed over with a little water on a pastery brush to help it stick. (Normally when covering sponge cake with roll out icing/sugarpaste you would use buttercream on the cake to stick it, but as the cakes were quite fragile I didn't want to risk breaking them.)
I then used the same knife as before to add texture to the 'shoes' by using a pointe shoe to copy. I added stitching, and material texture as well as dents in the shoe and any other marks to make it distinctive to a pointe shoes before dusting the whole thing in edible dust with a paint brush. I mixed a peach coloured dust with a shimmery white one to achieve the right colour. The casing for the drawstring I dusted with just the peach colour as I didn't want it shiny. The inside of the shoe and the platform I dusted with a little yellow dust like rosin, and I added detail to look like shadows and the 'Bloch' sticker.
I finally added the 'ribbon' which was thinly rolled sugarpaste/roll out icing, attaching them with a little water to the inside of the shoes, and these were also dusted in the same colour as the shoe. I made little bows out of tiny 'sausages' of icing to attach to the front of the shoe. These were also dusted in just the matte peach dust.
The shoes were arranged on a cake board which I had covered in roll out icing/sugarpaste and embossed with a bow stamp around the edges. I also coloured these with the pointe shoe colour.
So that's about it!! I would say that the most important thing for getting anything like this to look as much like what it's meant to as possible, would be to not guess how it's meant to look like but to pretend that you're not making an image of something, but the actual object-just in cake and icing! For example: You wouldn't 'glue' your pointe shoe ribbon on, you would sew it, so show the 'sewing' on the icing/cake. Same with the platform of the shoe: it's not flat, if you take the satin off like me it's very textured, so show that texture and the colour of any dirt/rosin you feel necessary!
Thanks again for all of your comments,
Sarah
