Twentyone Pilots Birthday Cake

Every cake I make I try to use a new technique or product I haven’t tried before. This time it was Sugar Sheets and food safe markets!

A coworker approached me to make an album cover cake for his son’s birthday this week. I’ve never heard of the band 21 Pilots before, but he had an album cover selected and knew exactly what he wanted.

The album cover (shown below) is what he wanted on a half sheet cake. So of course I had to get inventive with the details of this cake.

I started by printing a cope of the album cover thinking I could cut out the details and airbrush the designs onto sugar sheets. Let’s just say that was a fail. The details were much smaller than I anticipated. So, I free handed them using food safe markers! Once the designs were drawn, I cut out each circle and set them aside.

After baking an 11×15 vanilla sheet cake, I frosted the entire cake with black buttercream. I used a sheet of parchment paper to help smooth the buttercream to eliminate lines and bumps.

Using letter cutters, I cut out all of the letters for “twentyone pilots” and “happy birthday Blake” out of white fondant. I set these aside to start to harden.

Placement was key with this cake. I only had a limited amount of space to fit everything on the surface without it being too crowded. I used my Wilton fondant mat to lay out the surface of the cake within the available space.

Since the letters in the logo are more sharp than rounded, once the letters had slightly harder, I went in with my fondant knife (an exacto knife I only use for cakes and fondant) and trimmed the rounded corners of the letters off.

Once all of the design elements for the cake were ready, I applied the circle and letters to the cake. To make sure it was centered, I put a itty bitty notch in the fondant at 7.5″ (half of the 15″ cake) from the edge. Then counted characters to find the center of the Twentyone Pilots logo. Once the band name was placed I started placing the circle and worked my way down the cake.

Placing the sugar sheets was pretty simple. It comes on a plastic like backing like a sticker. Using a small amount of warm water on a brush, I brushed the back of the sugar sheet and then placed it on the buttercream. Using the parchment paper, I gently pressed the circle just below the buttercream top surface to seem seamless.

After everything was placed on the cake and I was confident in the layout, I used the parchment paper to press the fondant letters into the buttercream and smooth out the surface one last time.

I’m very pleased with how this cake turned out! I highly recommend using sugar sheets of any highly detailed surface. I would however recommend getting smaller tipped markers. The Wilton markers had quite a large top which was difficult to get some of the small detail lines into the hand drawings.

Happy Birthday Blake!