Caketime!

This weekend was my friend Kevin's 25th birthday. I met him in 11th grade in Spanish and decided to make this poor quiet, shy boy my friend. Poor kid.

He and his fianceé, Angelica, had a wedding to go to and were out of town all weekend, so they asked us to stop by and check on their ferret, Lola, and let her out to play for a couple hours. Jason and I took this perfect opportunity to buy a bag of balloons, streamers, a great party hat, birthday glasses, a couple "Happy Birthday!" banners, and 2L of Dr. Pepper, because it is his favorite, to decorate their place with as a surprise. We blew up all the balloons and then taped them to almost every surface in the entrance to their place and the living room. On the walls, chairs, mantle, ceiling, light switches, tables, and even his guitar. Although, we didn't tape them to his guitar, just stuck them between the strings. Then we strung the streamer all over the ceiling and hung up the banners. Unfortunately, we didn't take any pictures, but maybe Angelica did. She did say that she got a picture of him wearing the hat and glasses, so maybe I'll see if I can get a copy of that.

When they got home Sunday morning, his birthday, Kevin sent us a text message that said, "Thanks for watching Lola, but my house was apparently vandalized by clowns!"

Sunday morning I made him a cake, my first attempt with fondant. We have this awesome cake shop, Home Cake, near us that has anything and everything a baker could possibly ever want or need, and if she didn't, I'm sure she could special order it for you! So I was able to buy my pre-made rolled fondant there and not need to worry about making it. The recipe for fondant doesn't look too hard, but there are some ingredients I would need to buy (like glycerin), and now was not the time for experimenting.

To start off, the fondant was really easy. I kneaded in my yellow food coloring until I got it to the shade I wanted, and then I just rolled it out. When I transferred it to my cake, I started to have a few problems. No matter how much I smoothed it out, I couldn't get rid of these air bubbles on the sides. And I may have used too much cornstarch in rolling it out or took too long doing it and smoothing it on my cake because the egdes got a crackled look and the fondant kept tearing if I poked at it too much. I eventually gave up on trying to make it look perfect because this was, after all, my first attempt at fondant so I wasn't expecting too much. And I was rather pleased with what I had, I just wanted it to look better.

Kevin is a big fan of Watchmen, the graphic novel by Alan Moore, so I decided to make the iconic smiley face on this cake. I drew a stencil from my laptop, and then pressed an outline into the fondant and colored it in with this awesome food coloring pen that we picked up at the cake shop. They have them in all different colors, too. I was really impressed with how dark the color came out.

Then, I pressed on the outline of the blood drip and filled it in with my red gel.

Voilá!

Here's the cover art for comparison.

He thought it was pretty cool, and Angelica was super impressed! She was trying to convince me that I needed to make cakes for her 8th graders' graduation. This cake was cool, but it was definitely not up to professional standards. :)

The inside of the cake was white with a cocoa marble, to give it that Rorschach look. :D