Nisamina: Chicka chicka boom boom cake

This year, Emeline had a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom party. It was lots of fun to decorate the house with letters, have a coconut hunt, and have a Chicka Chicka Boom Boom story time. But I had the most fun and worked the hardest on the cake.

I decided to cover a cake with fondant, and then put some fondant cutouts on top to match the book cover. I hadn't covered a cake in fondant since my fondant class, so I needed some practice. I also decided to try my hand at marshmallow fondant and try out a new chocolate cake recipe.

My first try at the marshmallow fondant was a big sticky mess. The following you tube video was super helpful. I should have watched it first.

So to practice, I made a couple of little cakes. I covered one with fondant, and made some really quick and ugly cutouts and a border.

Then I just frosted one plain and put cut outs on that. I wanted to test out a back up plan in case my fondant covering skills didn't cut it.

As you can see, the fondant one looks much smoother, so I decided to go with that technique. Please disregard the ugly cutouts. I basically just slopped those on there to test it out, but most of this was to practice the fondant covering and doing a nice smooth butter cream base and compare the two.

A few things I learned....

The border looked kinda funky with just the holes poked, so I planned to do them with inlays to better match the book.
When I covered the cake with fondant, I cut it a little above the bottom thinking the border would cover this. With the holes, it looked kinda silly.
The border was hard to place without cutting, so I needed to come up with a better method for this. Wes suggested putting in on parchment and using that to carry it and press it on. This worked really well on the final cake.
The fondant cutouts were too thick and sticky, so I made sure they were not as moist and rolled thinner for the final version.
And finally, like all the marshmallow fondant tutorials say, it is MUCH easier to dye the fondant when the marshmallows are still melted. I did this for the big piece that covered the cake, but I dyed the smaller pieces individually so I didn't have to make each color its own batch.

Ok, so here is how the actual cake assembly went. Here is my chocolate cake dirty iced with chocolate frosting. I made it as smooth as possible so the fondant would be smooth. I worked really hard on this!

Here are the cut outs ready to go. Much thinner this time and more carefully cut.

Because I have so little time during the day to do these kinds of projects, did everything in steps in the evening after bed time. Fondant making one night. Fondant dying one night. Baking one night, and one final night for assembly. By the time I was ready to put on the fondant it had dried out and was really hard to roll out. It would be much better done the day after. So I had to get Wes and his brute strength involved to help me roll it smooth. I also should have made a larger batch for a tall 3 layer cake.

Here is is all covered with some of the cut outs.

And finally with the last of the cutouts and the border.

Here's a side view. Not completely smooth, I think mostly because the fondant had to be stretched really thin to make it big enough. More fondant next time. The border looks good, but hard to get perfectly straight. Inlays much better than the practice run.