In my intro post I talked about how I really fell in love with making cakes with Eli's first birthday cake, I did forget to mention I had taken a stab at decorating some basic cakes like a guitar one and even made my little sister a small snoopy cake. But those were pretty easy, Eli's cake though was a lot of work! Here is the process.
I got a wedding cake pan set, now let me say that makes A LOT of cake, we had a good sized party, about 30 people or so and still had tons of cake left over. However as my passion for photography I wanted to have a "smash" cake for Eli to photograph as well. The idea was to have the top be his "smash" cake. Although my son is not a very messy baby so there was little smashing. Anyway, I got the 3 pan set and I made a trial cake several weeks in advanced. I have never worked with fondant and I had heard its hard, but I knew there was no way I was doing butter cream on that big of a cake and getting the desired effect.
The cake was jungle themed, Eli's room is jungle themed and monkey's.... Lots of monkeys, so we wanted to incorporate that into his 1st birthday. I knew I wanted for sure at least a monkey, lion and elephant. I looked up online how to make fondant animals and found several blogs that showed different things. I had my own little style that I added to it. The cake was also going to have palm tree's on it. I saw in a magazine where someone used pretzel rods and gum paste to make the palm tree's. I altered that idea to make my own palm tree's, again the palm tree's I attempted a few weeks ahead of time and boy am I glad I did I learned that you need to form the palm leaves and let them dry before putting them on the rods or they were going to droop bad and not look right. So I went back to researching and found that I should cut the leaves out, and let them dry, to get the desired shape I used markers and laid the leaves over to let them dry overnight creating a curved effect in the leaves I used on the tree's. I also planned on using palm leaves around the cake so I made plenty of cutouts for it. I used a plain leaf cutout and then put cuts in it to make them look like palm leaves.
I let them dry overnight so they became hard, they were still slightly pliable too which helped. Next I took a ball of fresh fondant and placed it on top a pretzel rod to have a way of securing the leaves. Then I layered the leaves around the top of the ball. To attach the leaves I used a paint brush I use for baking and dipped it in water and brushed it on the back of the leaf and pressed it against the ball on top the pretzel. I held it for a few seconds to allow it to secure, then I continued around the whole thing.
The night before I had baked the cakes so they would be cool and ready for decorating. I cut the tops of the cakes off making them smooth and used a baster brush to brush off as many of the crumbs as possible before dirty icing the cake. I learned this method by watching Cake boss, its a thin layer of butter cream used to fix the fondant to the cake. You let the butter cream set for a few minutes, what I did was dirty ice all the cakes and then by the time I was done with the last one the first one was ready for the fondant.
All the cakes dirty iced and ready for fondant.
Now the thing with fondant is you have to get the cake pretty smooth or it will show through the fondant. Also it can be a pain to roll out and lift over the larger cakes. Something I read to do was to use the rolling pin to lift the fondant over the cake, that really helped with the bigger cake, you can kinda gently roll the fondant over the pin and then unroll it over the cake. I didn't mess with coloring the fondant for the cake as that can take awhile and hard to do with that much fondant. So since the cake was going to be all 1 color I just bought a can of the cake spray paint and used that. It took about a can and a half I think to do the full cake. Make sure you practice on something else BEFORE trying it on your main cake. Again I did a trial run about a week before with just the smallest pan.
The lion, I had read you can scratch the mane to make it look all fuzzy but I didn't want to mess up such a cute lion so I left it as is. Pretty much just a long "snake" that I wrapped around his head and joined at the chest. Turned out pretty cute!
To make the little toes on the elephant I just took a writer tip and pressed it into the feet. Also thats how I cut the eyes for the animals. I used a writer pipping tip and cut little dots out. The black was just a food marker that I dotted on the eyes after they had dried a little.
The little faces (like the lion showed here) were bought at a cake shop, they are little sugar candies. I attached them to the side of the cake using a little butter cream frosting.
The finished cake, The little animals around the bottom are candles my husband placed there just for photographing. The bottom tier of the cake has "grass" around it, I just cut strips of fondant and then cut about 3/4 of the way to make the little blades of grass.
The 2nd tier I used the palm leaves all around. Every other group of leaves I put one of those animal faces to look like they are peeking through the leaves.
The top tier I left blank except where I put "Happy B-day Elias" I made the letters just out of fondant that I rolled and shaped. You can buy little letter cut outs but they were like $20 and we had already gone over our budget for his party. I think the lettering that I did though actually turned out better because they kinda looked like little tree logs which fit the theme better.
This years cake I'm planning on a Sesame Street cake! Should be fun! Stay tuned!
