Safari Cake

This was my first attempt at using Fondant and I decided to make it as well. So a little back story. It is my amazing boyfriend Corey's sisters Sweet Sixteen and we were throwing her a surprise party. We were in charge of a safari cake with a blue to match her streamers. The picture below is Corey rolling out the fondant. For the cakes I just used box cake because we had to make 3 separate cakes and I made them all double layered. It helps to make these a day early, ice them, and then place them in the fridge to set.

Fondant is 1 package of mini marshmallows + a ton of powdered sugar. I have a fondant mat i purchased from Walmart for $10. I suggest you invest in one if you plan on doing fondant cakes because it made my life so easy. Take about 3/4 of your powdered sugar and make a volcano like mound with a large hole in the middle. Mini marshmallows are microwaved for 30 seconds at a time stirring every 30 seconds until it is creamy. This is when you add the food coloring. I made several batches on fondant so what ever color you want add how ever many drops you need, and stir!!! Now for the very hot and sticky part. You can choose to use Crisco on your hands and the mat to help with the sticking but honestly it still sticks to you. i just used it mostly on my spatula. So you keep folding in the powdered sugar into the marshmallow until it basically becomes like play-d'oh. That's when the handsome helpful boy friend comes into play with the fondant mat.

Now my 2nd layer cake was 9" So all he had to do was roll the fondant out to the marker on my mat but really you just want the fondant as thin as possible so you can do without the measurements. I then laid the mat over my cake. I peeled the mat off and smoothed down my fondant starting from the middle of the cake and going in a circular motion toward the edge. Don't force the fondant it will go itself. I watched about 25 videos on this before I attempted it, and since i don't do video posts I highly recommend you do the same. So once my fondant got toward the bottom you just cut along the edge of the cake and push it in toward the cake to give it a finish.

As you can see her name is Kemlyn. I made some black fondant, rolled out and used cookie cutters to spell out her name. Add a little water to the back and they stick right onto the other fondant.

Layer 1 was Zebra. This is a 12" cake triple layered. I rolled out the black fondant and used a pizza roller to cut thick squiggly lines. You don't want them to go all the way to the center because it will make the middle layer cake uneven.

As I placed on the middle layer i cut the excess of the zebra stripe off to make it seem like it goes right into the cake.

Top layer was giraffe! Corey was not home at this point so I had to do the picture taking by myself so not many shots of this. Basically it is yellow fondant with brown fondant cut into odd shapes and placed all around.

I used a black icing piper to add some finishing touches around the layers.

Here it is with the candles!

And the proud big brother and the birthday girl with the cake!