purple patron party

a friend of mine has been decorating cakes for about as long as i have. we have totally different approaches to cake making. ava is fearless. she thinks that if a cake can be made, why can't she be the one to make it? where as i am very careful to push my skill level envelope. don't get me wrong. i'm not affraid of new things. i'm affraid of crazy new things.

after deciding to have a purple patron party, ava knew she wanted a big cake to be the centerpiece of the night. she asked me to work on it with her and i was super excited about trying some new techniques on a nice three layer cake (i thought that was big). well, let me just show you what she had in mind.
as you can see, i was going to be way out of my comfort zone. however, despite all my little pushes toward a more sensible cake, this girl was going...crazy big cake.

i am so glad that she did. we actually got to add a bunch of stuff to our cake arsenal. we found a great edible silver spray paint, i did my first real carving, and we learned how to stack a crooked cake. when i say "we learned," i mean, i asked how to do, got scared, kept trying to talk ava out of doing it, and then she did it when i wasn't there. :) here are some "during the process" pictures...

and the cake...

i have to say a little about this patron bottle. i have just started wanting to get into carving. this was my first real go at it. i'm really happy with the way it turned out. although, next time i will use edible paper for the labels - i hate when everything is not edible.