The Legend of Zelda: Furnix Cake
Over on deviantART, Game Art HQ hosted a The Legend of Zelda art collab called "Link's Blacklist". But the really cool and different thing about this collab is that it was Zelda enemies only. Game Art HQ only accepts what it deems to be quality art, so the standard was pretty amazing. 60 artist each claimed a different enemy and set to work. If you're a fan of the series, or even if you're not, you should go check out the gallery. It's so amazing the creative stuff fans come up with.
So everyone pretty much did digital art. Well, I'm a digital art newbie and thought that probably wouldn't be up to scratch, so I decided to turn to a medium I'm a little more advanced in: cake!
I chose to do Furnix from Skyward Sword.
The first time I saw these gorgeous birds flying around and hoped I wouldn't have to kill something so beautiful. Then they started spitting fireballs at me. Sigh.
This cake in all honesty was a disaster from beginning to end. I nearly gave up three times. I felt like bursting into tears about a dozen times. But I won't blab on about all the things that went wrong here. I've whinged all about the in the blog. Let's just talk about the cake here.
The biggest challenge with this cake was how to make a bird topper. I do everything to avoid putting inedible components into a cake, but since this one was for an art project I decided to cross over with techniques used for clay modelling. So I made a wire frame to give the structure support.
I set about making the cake. I used a buttercake. I coloured half red, half yellow, then marbled it in the middle. I layered this and covered it with orange-flavoured buttercream.
Once that was assembled, I bulked up the frame a bit and got a rough bird shape.
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Then I set about covering the whole lot in feathers. This took about 10 times as long as I imagined it would.
I wrapped the cake in ruffles to match the internal colours. I figured it was sort of fire-like anyway and fitted the theme.
Some 3 weeks and several disasters later, I finished this overly ambitious adventure. There are a lot of things I would have liked to have done better, but by the end I just wanted the ordeal to be over, so things became "good enough". I hate doing just good enough, but I lost my ability to care.
At least it sort of resembled a Furnix.
The cake stands a total of 30cm tall and has a wingspan of 24cm. By the end I was wishing I hadn't done something so huge.
My favourite view is admittedly from the back. It's here you get to see most of the detail.
The wings took me around 15 hours to complete. Perhaps more. I lost my concept of time. The difficult aspect of the wings, aside from the intricacy of the feathers, as that here more than anywhere else has a lot of two-tone parts. That made it a massive challenge. I got out of it with the curled yellow feathers by painting the purple on with lustre dust. However, the purple was the only colour I felt this could work aesthetically. For the red and yellow feathers, I piped strands of fondant and rolled them together to get the two toned feathers. That sad part is, these became mostly obscured by the yellow swirls and the other feathers. But if you look closely you can see it.
All of the feathers over the entire bird were individually cut and placed. It took so long, but I think the detail it gives is worth it.
Then there is the Furnix's gorgeous tail. The tail is both a prominent part of the design of the bird, as well as important for battling the bird in the game. As it appraoches you, it's tail is curled tightly up while it spits fireballs at you. If you hold it's attention for long enough, it's agression will escalate and it will unwrap its tail and prepare to strike you. It's in that moment that Link has to use his whip to latch onto the tail and yank the Furnix to the ground where he can battle it.
I had absolute hell trying to make the curled yellow/purple feathers stay upright on the tail, but we got there in the end!
I made the length of the tail run down the cake - some is attached to the wire, other parts to the cake itself.
And lastly it the tip of the tail, the part that Link latches onto and is so vital in the defeat of this enemy. I didn't do justice to it at all, but I hope it at least resembles the tip.
Phew! As stressful as that all was, I'm glad I didn't throw in the towel and kept going. In the end I got something that, while quite far from perfect, challenged me in all sorts of manners. It's from mistakes that we learn best, and this cake was an excellent teacher.
If you'd like to see more, there's lots more photos and lots of blabbing about all my mistakes over at Cakecrumbs.