Adventures in Fondant

A few days ago, I was working on this cake for some friends.  My friend, Beth, had been talking about planning for her kids' birthday party and trying to keep to her budget.  So since, I like making birthday cakes, I offered to make their cake as their birthday present.  Beth thought that was a great idea, so I went to work. 

After I had my idea (thanks to the internet) I made the cakes--Red Velvet, as Beth requested.  I originally made two 8 inch rounds and two 6 inch round.  But I realized that I was making way more cake than what we were going to need, and that I would have more time to do this cake if I cut it down to just one stack.  So it turned into a just a two layer 8 inch cake.

 

Here's the cakes with their crumb coat of cream cheese frosting.

  

Then I got a little adventurous and decided to make the top coat of icing out of homemade fondant.  I've used store bought fondant before, but hadn't ever made it before.  The recipe was super easy, so that's good.  The only thing about fondant whether it's homemade or store bought is that it's hard to roll out and then work with.  With store bought, it can be hard (time consuming) to mix in any color that you want, and it's usually so dense that it takes some serious muscle to roll it out thin.  With the homemade stuff, the texture was at the opposite end of the spectrum--very soft.  So I kept adding powdered sugar since it kept sticking to my rolling mat and pin.  I finally got it to not stick and pull apart and got it onto the cake.  I didn't take enough time to smooth out all the bumps in the blue fondant, but that's ok.  It tasted just the same.  

Originally, I had planned to make the snowmen edible, but I ended up making them scrapbook-able instead.  They are made out of white flannel, some felt scraps, and buttons.

  

Both Trey and Morgan seemed to enjoy their cake, and I'm glad they did.

Then with my extra two layer 6 inch cake, I used some time the next day during a power outage to decorate a little cake for our friend Orion.  His family was celebrating his first birthday that evening, and I thought it was a great way to use the extra cake and fondant that I had from Trey and Morgan's cake.  I put the red frosting on to try to make it not look too much like the earth.  Try as I might, I couldn't get my spots to stay uniform, so I just went with the blob look.  Oh well, it's artistic that way!

 

I really do enjoy making cakes and this recent opportunity to make some for friends was a lot of fun.