I made a thing, I kind of screwed it up but it's ok

My daughter wanted one of those amethyst geode cakes for her 7th birthday. I watched a few tutorials and then decided to wing it. It's not perfect, but it tasted good.

You need at least two different shades of rock candy, smashed into various realistic crystal shapes, one batch of white, some piping gel (that's the glue) and some gold leaf that supposedly makes the whole thing pretty.

Fuck gold leaf. More on that later.

Start with a cake, carve a realistic geode-y cavity in it. Crumb coat the surface with buttercream.

It's ok to hate on my chipped, old-ass dragée tongs. It is surprisingly difficult to rationalize the purchase of new ones, so I find I'm ok with it as long as nothing transfers (and nothing does, because the paint is worn off completely on the inside).

You start by giving it a light coat of piping gel and plugging in crystals, the darkest toward the inside. Not too heavy with the gel because the smaller crystals seem to melt right into it. At this point you have to plug in crystals for a while, chill for a while, then pull it out and plug in more because you want to keep the whole thing pretty firm.

Gotta vary the size and shape of crystals for a more natural look. Just work your way toward the outside and finish up with white.

Now, ideally, even if you do a shit job on crystal placement, on the nice cakes the gold leaf pulls it all together and kind of glosses things over with the "wow" factor. I've worked with gold leaf before and I swear I know how to do it. Except this package (which only had five leaves) was bound on one side like a book, and I wasn't expecting it, so when I went to pull the tissue paper apart the leaves fluttered out in a humid kitchen and I had to catch them in midair, so they were a wadded mess. Then I had to salvage the wadded mess and try to transfer it onto the cake, so the results were less than ideal.

It still looked ok, and she liked it, so that's what counts.

Cat tax.