I’ve showed this finished cake before but never actually posted detail shots.  Let’s remedy that.

A few years ago a co-worker of my brother’s asked if I could make a cake matching an image she’d found online.

At the time it didn’t occur to me to check online to see whose design it was.  I just looked now and can’t find an exact source.  I can see it listed on Cake Picture Gallery without a source, and a very similar design here on cakesdecor.com credited to Berliosca Cake Boutique in BC.  I don’t know whose came first.  In any case, I was asked to make just one tier, no water/bridge/statue, and told she’d provide the apple herself.

I decided to build it up with a checkerboard cake, partly because I needed the height from the three layers to fit the skyline, and partly because I loved the idea of a New York-themed cake having a taxi cab-esque checkerboard on the inside.  (It’s deliciouser on the inside.  Heh.)

I leveled the cakes and filled them with homemade buttercream, then did a crumb coat around the entire cake.  I let that set up in the fridge while tinting some store-bought white fondant into the pale gray-ish blue color.  Rolled it out and covered the cake.

I bought pre-tinted black fondant and rolled out a thick disc to set the cake on, then rolled out some strips the height of my tallest building.  I eyeballed the building placement, going off the sample pic and just tried to make sure I had some variation in heights for interest.  You can see in the pic below that I used a toothpick to support the tallest building.  I cut out the buildings in groupings of 2-3 and ‘glued’ them around the cake with a bit of water.  I stuck them on after setting the cake in place, so I could make sure to butt them down as low as possible to the ‘road’.

  I thinned some black food gel and dotted the ‘stars’ around the sky, and used Wilton whitener for the road markings and the ‘windows’.  Sadly I didn’t think to thicken the whitener with a bit of icing sugar, so it paled considerably once dried, and I had to do a second coat on most of them.  To make the adorable taxis I tinted some white fondant yellow and shaped it into a rectangular brick.  I cut off the outside corners with a sharp knife then sliced the resulting “T” shape into car-appropriate widths.  The wheels are tiny flattened disks of black fondant, everything ‘glued’ together with a bit of water.

 

The last thing to do was the grass for the top.  I knew they’d be adding the apple on-site, but making a green fondant disk felt too easy.  I had leftover buttercream so I tinted it green and hand-piped the blades of grass with a piping bag and multi-holed icing tip. I later received this pic from the woman who’d bought the cake.  I love seeing the inside, seeing that the checkerboard lined up properly!  😀