Adventures in Cake Decorating...

Today is my son's 4th birthday party, and this year we wanted to up the party a notch since he's getting older and might start to actually remember these things now.  Plus, I have a habit of taking on new hobbies and challenges on a daily basis practically....I get something in my head and I can't let it go til I try it....which is kinda how the photography business came about too!

So anyways...I decided this year that instead of buying his birthday cake from Ralphs (a local grocery store) like we do every year...I wanted to get a pretty fondant cake like you see on t.v..  Little did I know that these cakes cost a fortune to have someone make them (with good reason though!)  Since we were already spending so much money on a room rental, tons of decorations, food, etc., I couldn't bring myself to pay upwards of $150 for a cake....I like to spend, but I'm reasonable as well.

BUT I was REALLY stuck on this whole fondant cake idea.....so I asked "how hard could it be??"

I've decorated a couple of cakes in my lifetime...nothing fancy at all though....but I used to work at Baskin Robbins in my younger days and watched them make cakes all the time.  Not fondant, but decorating nonetheless.

After many back and forth debates with my fiance about how much we'd actually spend after buying all the supplies (we had NOTHING to start with), the time, the difficulty (after reading the directions it sounded very complicated), etc....I decided to stick to my guns and insist we make our own fondant cake.

Well as you can see below, attempt one to just BAKE the cake didn't go so well...yes, I know the directions said NOT to use butter to grease the pan, but that's all I had...so I figured it would work just fine.....well, it didn't....and the cake crumbled when I tried to get it out of the pan.  So attempt number two included using the alternative suggestion which was to use parchment paper on the bottom of the pan.  That worked. :)

After staying up all night Thursday making the first layer plus cupcakes, then waking up Friday morning before work and making the second layer of cake, I finally had all the cake baking done!

Friday night was the decorating night...and you know what?  The fondant was not nearly as difficult to work with as I thought it would be!!  Dan (my fiance) helped me roll it out and he handled all the dying for the different colors.  The whole experience turned out to be a really nice family arts and crafts experience.  I literally felt like I was just doing a craft.  So when I told Caydan to take a bite of fondant, it was strange because it was like we were going to eat play doh or something, lol.  But it was kinda tasty. :)

So anyways, enough rambling....at the end of the night, a giant two layer cake with chocolate frosting in the middle, chocolate paw print cupcakes, bone shaped sugar cookies (no pics of those though), and bone shaped rice krispie treats (no pics either) later....we did everything we set out to do!  And I have to say....I'm REALLY proud of the results.  For our first fondant cake, and our first attempt at anything at this level, I think we did pretty darn good.

Here's some pics. :)

(P.S. It's a Scooby Doo themed party...we have some Scooby figurines to put on the cake too, I'll post after the party today!)