We're still recovering from the crud that we picked up at Christmas. The kids didn't have near the trouble with it that the hubby and I did. We've been walking dead for several days now. I started perking up just in time to panic about the Youngest's Birthday party. I'm still coughing my head off, but other than that, I feel fine. Hubby's voice is much more deep than usual. He lost his voice one night and it was so funny. I've never seen him do that before. Anyway.
Friday afternoon I decided to make the Youngest a birthday cake. He's really into Larry Boy from Veggie Tales so I figured that would be perfect. I really did not want to work with icing bags or tips. Nor did I want to just smooth icing onto it. I decided that the best thing would be to make a fondant cake. The only problem? I had never worked with fondant before.
Well, God bless the internet. I'm just sayin'.
Using this site and this picture of a cake that someone else did with fondant, I began. The recipe was super simple and tastes fairly good for fondant. I will definitely be using this again. All you need is a lot of powdered sugar and mini marshmallows. Sounds yucky huh? and sticky.
This was so much fun. I felt like I was playing with modeling clay. The hardest part was creating the fondant and adding the color to it. My kitchen aid mixer is mega tough though and handled the job nicely. I didn't have tons of time to spend kneading everything in. The birthday party was going to be on Saturday.
I wish I had taken some step by step pics. But since I was learning something new and didn't have much time, the camera had to stay on the shelf where it's kept.
To get the Larry Boy shape, I baked a 9 x 13 sheet cake and let it cool on Thursday. Then on Friday afternoon, I trimmed off all four corners to make a rocket/cucumber shape. The extra was used to make the nose and the crest for his helmet. I used licorice for the belt. Fondant was used for everything else. A pizza cutter works great for trimming the fondant. I also used the lids from some of my spices to get the right circular shapes too. The plunger ears were made from cutting a piece of shortcake in two and coating them with red fondant icing.
Make sure you use some buttercream frosting on your cake before you put the fondant on it. It acts like glue and holds the fondant on the cake. I had to use extra for the licorice. It really didn't want to stay where I put it.
Here's how it turned out. Please forgive my camera, it likes to make all dark purple turn to blue and I haven't figured out how to correct it yet.
Meet Larry Boy
See the Youngest's Reaction? I did good.
