the ladybug cake, part 1

last night, my friend, erin, and i made our first attempt at making a cake with fondant. we've been talking about doing this awhile because erin's daughter, sophie, is turning one in november. since neither of us have ever worked with fondant before (seriously, this was the most domestically-challenging thing i've ever done), we thought it'd be good if we had at least one trial run before the big day.

we used this fondant recipe and substituted the small marshmellows with about 2.5 jars of marshmellow fluff. we refrigerated the fluff beforehand, but not overnight like the recipe says. after we made the fondant, we stuck it in the fridge and baked our cakes. now, here was our first mistake. actually, my mistake. i forgot to bring my 9-inch cake pans, so we baked 2 cakes in 9x13-inch pans using regular funfetti cake mix. after the cakes came out of the oven, we put them in the freezer to cool them and added food coloring to the fondant. next time, we plan to wear gloves so our hands don't look like this after kneading food coloring into fondant:



unfortunately, the cakes did not come out of the pans very well, so they were already crumbly when we attempted to cut 3 circles out of them. this was a huge disaster when we iced the cake (using regular vanilla frosting) because the cake was literally falling apart (you ice the cake to help the fondant stick):




at this point, we thought we had failed. but then erin rolled out the fondant and basically threw it onto the cake really quickly. and while there were still many aesthetic issues to take care of such as the lumpiness of the cake (due to how crumbly it was) and the downhill slope of the top layer, we still felt proud that we had managed to get fondant on a cake. so we finished our decorating by cutting out lots of circles from fondant we had colored black to make spots and two more circles out of white fondant to make eyes. can you guess what this turned into??




a ladybug! once we covered up some of the lumps, we were really impressed with our workmanship and decided, for our first try, it wasn't half bad :)

at that point, it was about 10:30. miss ladybug herself had already fallen asleep.

we had a bunch of fondant leftover, our husbands needed to go to walmart, so i said to erin, "let's try again." we found a recipe for a denser cake (all you do is add an additional egg and a pack of instant pudding mix to the regular cakebox recipe) and bought 9-inch circle pans and parchment paper to ensure the cakes wouldn't stick (at this point, i'd like to note that while we were at walmart, erin went upstairs to put sophie in her crib, and our crazy dog, hudson, jumped on the table and ate almost an entire 9x13 cake because that's about what we had leftover in scraps after we cut out three circles).

the cakes came out of the pans beautifully and iced up really well. we had a few problems getting the fondant off the table and onto the cake (at one point, erin had finally succeeded in getting the fondant off the table, but i wasn't paying attention, so she dropped the fondant before i could get the cake in front of her. then she threw a ball of fondant at me.) BUT, we FINALLY at around midnight had successfully completed another cake. and i'm not trying to brag, but we are awesome:

we cut into the first cake just to make sure it actually tasted good. i've heard before that fondant isn't very tasty, and we were worried about the food coloring. i think we all agreed that it was delicious and that while we could taste a little bit of bitterness from the food coloring, the cake would totally pass at a birthday party. i'm not sure what flavor of cake we'll go with for the real thing, but we'll probably ice the cake pre-fondant using my mother-in-law's delicious recipe for buttercream icing.

and now that we've gotten our confidence up, i think erin and i will try to expand our repetoire outside of ladybugs. and maybe one day, we'll start a little business and help people raise money for adoptions :)