the ladybug cake, part 2

if you saw this post, you know my friend, erin, and i did a trial run a couple of months ago for her daughter, sophie's, first birthday cake. i suggested to erin awhile back that we should do a fondant cake for sophie since you can take more artistic license with fondant because it can be molded, cut into shapes, etc.

well, friday was the big day, and we had our dear friend, leigh, to help create the finished product. here's what we came up with:

now, here's the backstory and how-to. erin and i got together thursday night and made the cakes so they could chill in the refrigerator overnight to make icing and then applying the fondant easier. apparently, i threw a fit the last time we did this and insisted that sophie should have a homemade cake on her birthday (instead of box mix), so we tried 2 different cake recipes for the tiers (the bottom tier was chocolate, the 2 smaller tiers were vanilla). but some unfortunate things happened, including me doing something weird with the butter in the middle cake tier, and we were forced back to box mix. that actually ended up better because we found the last time that adding an extra egg and a box of pudding mix to the box mix helps make a denser cake.

we cooked the bottom cake in a wok, the middle cake in a mixing bowl, and the little cake in a small dish. we frosted all the cakes with homemade buttercream frosting. erin had the vision to contrast the colors of the three ladybugs, so she increased the amount of red food coloring in each cake, adding a little black to the last one. you can't see much different between the bottom and middle tiers in the pictures, but the big cake was more raspberry red while the middle cake was more hot pink. and, as a side note, if you ever try this, use food coloring dye instead of gel. everybody thought the black gel made the fondant extremely bitter.

in all, we were pleased with how the final product came out. the cake is a bit more lumpier than the second cake from last time, but we were working with a substantially larger cake. plus, we were in a bit of a time crunch, so we had to throw perfection out the window. besides, this little girl was happy, so i think we did our job right!