I wanted to do a guitar cake ever since I saw the mirror glaze technique online. The glossy, reflective icing I thought would be perfect to match the finish on a guitar.
I went to my brother, who plays guitar, to look for any spare parts he might have. He has done a couple of guitar builds so I thought he might have some reference material I could use. I was intending to take molds of some pieces to replicate in chocolate.
I did end up borrowing a few items, but I only ended up using a few of them. I went with a different style guitar than he had, so I had to work from online image references for shape and type of hardware to put on the guitar.
I started by looking online and found some actual guitar schematics. They didn’t print at the size I would need for a cake, so I did some measurements and tried my best to increase the size and plan where all the hardware would go on the cake.
Because mirror glaze is runny, I knew I couldn’t just set the hardware on top of the cake. I molded several pieces and put toothpicks into the bottom when I cast in white chocolate so they would have something to go down through the glaze and into the cake.
I made the hardware first and then moved on to the cake.
Covering the body of the guitar in white chocolate ganache was trickier than I anticipated, and it was hard to get the right contours of the guitar body.
The glazing part was SO MUCH FUN! I was originally going to go with candy apple red (perfect for guitars) but then I decided to try a swirl pattern. Red takes so much colouring to get it right. The pour worked well.
Putting on the hardware was a bit tricky. I managed to get it into place. the neck was difficult, but nowhere near as tricky as the strings. I didn’t like how they turned out, but I was out of time to try anything else. I used some floral wire, but they weren’t long enough to go the full distance and were bend and didn’t look tight. If I ever did this again, I’d go and get some thinner wire. I didn’t want to pipe the strings with icing as it would sag – I wanted the strings to sit where they normally would on the hardware – floating over from the bridge to the pickup and then onto the neck.
