Making a Hyperrealistic CAKE and Owning Up To My Mistakes!

My goal is for you to see the cake that I made today and say, I can't believe it's a cake. I want this cake to be so hyper-realistic that you're literally tricked into thinking it's the actual object. This is not an easy task. It is very hard to trick you guys, but I am up for the challenge. While I make today's cake, I am also going to talk about how I feel about making mistakes, because sometimes I mess up. My name is Natalie Sidesurf, and I make cakes that don't look like cakes. And today, I'm going to show you how I made an I-can't-believe-it's-not-butter cake. You know what I do when I make my crazy cakes? What? I make a lot of mistakes, like a lot, because I'm always trying out new things and experimenting. That's how I teach myself how to create all these wild, hyper-realistic cakes. But you know what I'm good at? Getting over my mistakes quickly, because the quicker that I accept my mistake and I avoid dwelling on it for too long, the quicker I can fix that mistake. If making hyper-realistic cakes was easy and didn't require a lot of trial and error, then everyone would do it. And then you all wouldn't be watching me make this cake right now, because it would be no big deal. Cake art is the life skill that I chose to hone. It's kind of weird to say out loud. If I've learned anything over the years of making cake art, it's that you've got to challenge yourself and step outside of your comfort zone and get to making mistakes, because that's how you get better. I actually made a mistake while making this cake right here. To make this cake as hyper-realistic as possible, I used a mold for the actual shape of the bottle. Now, in the past, I've used molding putty to add little details to my cakes. And I've used the actual objects as a mold, like I've filled a Styrofoam bowl with a layer of modeling chocolate to make an edible bowl. But this was different. This was next-level mold making. This time, the entire shape of the cake was created using a mold. I made a pour mold. Pour mold, is that what it's called? Like I said, I'm new to this. Anyway, what I mean by pour mold is I poured a liquid material over the real bottle to create a mold of it. My lack of experience making a mold in this way led to me messing up. On my first go, I made the mold. We're all good there. And then I poured the yellow chocolate into the mold, let it completely set up, went to pop it out of the mold, and it wouldn't come out. The chocolate wouldn't release from the mold that I made. At first, I didn't understand why. And then it hit me. With this size and type of mold, you gotta grease the mold before you pour in the chocolate, similar to how you would grease a cake pan so that your cake releases. I like, like I knew that, but I also didn't quite know. Like I said, this kind of mold making is new to me. So I had to start all over, only the second time I sprayed a little cooking oil into the mold before I poured in the chocolate and it popped right out. Lesson learned. Will I ever forget to grease my mold again? Yeah, probably, but that's okay because I'm just not super experienced in that area quite yet. So the steps I have to take to pour the mold, they just don't really come naturally to me. Not yet, at least. I'm likely to mess up a bunch until I do it enough times to eventually stop messing up, like everything else I do. And then I'll have a new skill that I execute flawlessly, probably somewhat kind of flawlessly. There is no shame in making mistakes. I think that if I'm not making mistakes, then I'm really not growing. I'm not getting any better. I think sometimes some of us tend to be scared of making mistakes. How many times have you passed on an opportunity that you knew would be good for you or even just fun because you were scared? Because I've been there. And I'm not talking about actually putting yourself in any real danger. That is not what I mean. I'm talking about the mind games that we play in order to avoid things that intimidate us. A good example is about nine years ago when I was asked to make a cake on a TV show on Food Network. It was the first time I was ever asked to be on TV. And I was so close to passing on the opportunity because I started to doubt myself. I told myself that I wasn't experienced enough or that I wouldn't be very good on TV. I even told myself that it really wasn't a big deal. But I quickly realized that I was just using fear as an excuse so that I didn't have to do something that I was nervous to do. Deep down, I knew that it would be a really rewarding experience. So I bucked up and I did it anyway. And guess what? It wasn't even that bad. In fact, it was fun. My first time on TV definitely didn't go exactly as I had hoped. There were some embarrassing and awkward moments and some things about TV that I just didn't understand until I was literally there filming. But that's just gonna happen when you do something new. You can't predict how it's gonna go down. And that's the fun of it. And the best part of it all was that I learned a lot. I learned about the production side of making videos and I still use some of that knowledge today with my YouTube videos. And since then, I've been on a bunch of TV shows and every time I go on a show, it gets easier and easier. Now my fear of being on TV is pretty much completely gone. So now when I'm asked to be on a show or to talk on stage, anything like that, I'm able to focus on just doing a really good job and having some fun instead of being nervous the whole time. Now I get excited when I have that scared feeling. I wanna do more things that make me nervous because it's incredibly rewarding to face that fear and get through it. Turns out, being scared doesn't always have to be a bad thing. It can be an indicator of something really great. When I was younger, I always found people in high positions to be intimidating. But now that I'm older, I realize that most of them are just faking it till they make it too. They're usually just people who work really hard and we're all capable of doing that. And there you have it. And I can't believe it's not butter cake. I'm happy with the results of that mold. The shape of the bottle looks pretty good. Now I just need to work on the thickness of that yellow chocolate. It definitely needs to be thinner next time. All right, let's cut the cake. There's that green buttercream. I'll see you next week for another cake.