Baker’s Playdough

Thing 3 turns 4 next Monday and I’ve been envisioning a masterpiece cake — and it required learning to deal with fondant, which for reasons I don’t understand now seemed a little intimidating. I thought it would be . . . stiffer . . . and trickier somehow. Then Glenna started a series on the birthday cakes she is making with fondant so I felt a bit more confident about tackling it.

It’s *playdough* with a different smell! 😀  (hehehe!)

But now my little Thing 3 wants an elephant cake . . . so I don’t need to use fondant. I still could, I guess, but I don’t like the taste of fondant at all (and it’s more expensive) so it seems like any time regular old buttercream/cream cheese frosting would work, I’d prefer to use that. But I had some fondant and I wanted to play with my new toys! Fortunately, one of the Husband’s co-workers is turning 40 today, so I had a reason to use it.

I have *never* been able to get the sides & tops of my cakes as smooth as I would like (so don’t look too closely at that part) and last night, hours after a brief stop in Michael’s for the cookie cutters, I realized why, at least in part. I could really use a spatula that is longer than 3 inches so I’m not forever going back and forth to smooth things but could just make large sweeping motions. Actually, in my brief stop in the cake decorating section I saw about $50 worth of tools that would make cake decorating *sooooo* much easier. I don’t make cakes all *that* often, but I may pick up a few things here and there over the next year so it’s not so frustrating when I do make a cake.

This has five layers of cake and two different fillings so that it is layered as such: white cake, dark chocolate ganache, double chocolate cake, blackberry whipping cream, white cake, blackberry whipping cream, double chocolate cake, dark chocolate ganache, and white cake. I put on a crumb coat with thin cream cheese buttercream frosting then spread on the peachy-pink buttercream layer, piped on the borders, and put the dried fondant flowers on with a dot of buttercream in the centers.  I’d love to see it sliced to see if it looks as good as I had hoped!

It was a fun experiment, fun to learn something new, and I’ll definitely use it again.

Happy Birthday, Lori!