It's All In The Details
Details. That is what life is all about, isn't it? Those tiny little things that can make a statue or painting seem alive, yet if they are missing, we may not be able to specifically pinpoint what seems off.
Freckles are details on a person that give them their own look, just like laugh lines or grey hairs. Furniture makers add in details such as wood grain overlays to make their press-board shelves look like real wood, while companies are constantly tweaking their logos in minuscule ways to make them more relevant to their target market. Without the little details in life, things would be boring.
Personally, I think details are what bring art to the next level and make life more exciting. Can you imagine what life would be like without different colors and patterns and textures? I cannot bear the thought. That is why I am so careful to pay attention to details in the things that I create. This shows clearly in the cakes that I have made over the years for my family.
When one son asked for a "Bad Kitty" cake He got a "Bad Kitty" cake and a stack of sugar cookies, each with one of Kitty's friends depicted on it.
The other son wanted a "Sushi Cat" cake and so my daughter and I made dozens of tiny fondant sushi to place all around the cake. Then we served actual sushi to match.
One year my daughter asked for a dollhouse cake. It was not the best cake ever as I was trying to get used to the humidity of a Florida summer, but there were tiny carrot in the garden that you could actually pull out of the ground and eat, and a little girl sitting on the rocks by the pond.
In a similar fashion, the "Nyan Cat" cake I made this year had little royal icing treats around the sides.
One year, for my birthday, I just wanted to get away and relax. That was the year I made myself an island getaway scene. The cake was a small island with some palm trees and coconuts. There were sandy beaches to relax on, cool blue water, and a small shack just big enough for one person was nestled in among some rose bushes, with a single pair of sandals sitting outside the door.
One son has a March 14th birthday, which any math fans may know as "Pi Day." One year he wanted the colors for his birthday to be blue and brown and the theme to be Pi. He loved the scalloped sides and the stars around the edge (partially done by my daughter) but the biggest highlight was that I had made sugar cookies depicting Pi to the 30th decimal place and those were iced in alternating blue and brown to match the cake.
They have learned that I will always find a detail to surprise them with and make the cake a touch more magical.
A friend learned this when she hired me to make her a cake and some cookies to go with it. I was given an online image and some basic parameters and that was it. The final result can be seen here.
Each of the different colored cookies has dough that is colored and flavored to match the icing, and is iced in a specific manner depending on the color. Even the fondant flowers on the cake match the flavors of the cookies.
Like I said earlier, details are what life is all about. That is why I love making gum-paste flowers. There are so many flowers and varieties of flowers in this world that I can continue to study and improve my skills and yet will never be able to make every type of flower that exists, even if I had a hundred lifetimes.
I delight in getting a gum-paste flower to turn out like the real flower that it is modeled after. I get a bit sad when I struggle with a certain type of flower (Hibiscus are not my friends these days) but I know that some day, as I keep working at it and improving my skills further, I shall conquer yet another flower type. Then, when I post a photo or hand a box of flowers to a baker and hear, "They look real," that is when I know that I have done my job successfully and gotten all the details right. Yet, I will never stop striving to learn more or get better at my craft, because there is always room for improvement.
