Well, It Wasn't a Complete Disaster...

So, as you all are aware I'm sure, it's the holiday weekend, and like most of you, I have plans to meet with the families. These plans have been set for about a week now...Sunday with his family, Monday with mine. I got large 3 tier cake pans and was all stoked to make a gigantic cake for my family's get together, but Kelly (the girl who helped inspire me to start all this craziness) got dibs on the cake this year, no worries I thought I can do a smaller rendition for his family. I thought about what I wanted to do for a few days and came up with the following: Chocolate bottom layer made in a 12x2" pan, strawberry top layer made in a 8x2" pan with a beautiful fondant icing and decorations. So what that I've never used fondant before. I can totally bust this out...or so I thought!
So, why am I blogging about the cake I am going to make tomorrow today? Well, because my mom asked me to make a cake for our out of town relative Kaylee who is in town and just turned 17. "Great! I thought, now I can make a cake for my cousin and get a chance to work with fondant once before making the cake for tomorrow! Win, Win.
Since I am all about homemade cooking and baking, I found a really cool fondant recipe that is made from marshmallows. It had rave reviews, so I made that first thing this morning, but instead of following the recipe, I followed the notes from a commenter on the recipe...BAD IDEA!! The fondant was a huge sticky mess that was everywhere and difficult to clean up. I was pissed and now had no other option but to go out and buy Wilton's Fondant at Walmart. Grr! This is not home cooking, I thought, but I had no other options. So I whipped up some buttercream frosting, frosted the cake and sent the hubs to Walley World.
He met me at the inlaws house where I began working with this extremely tough stuff! I wanted to make it really red and then have a white bow. After kneading the shit out of this so called edible stuff, I finally gave in and accepted the coral color that I had achieved. Rolled it out, and like a 3 year old screwing around with playdough for the first time ever, I started forming the fondant around the cake...the square cake...I had no idea how to smooth out the corners so I just wrapped those bitches around to the side and made it seem as thought I wanted it to look like wrapping paper....which I most certainly did not, but for the most part, it looked ok.
Now, for the decor! Well, I didn't want to open the other package of $6 fondant so I just kneaded more red coloring into the leftovers to make a deeper red...but this made the fondant so thin and soft I couldn't do anything but cut outs. Fortunately, my mother in law had cookie cutters so I made a heart and slapped it on there all by itself. I had no icing for writing so it was a "less is more" kind of theme for the decorations. It looked ok for my very first time trying to deal with fondant having never taken any kind of class or anything on how to work with this tricky product. Needless to say, tomorrow's cake has certainly been changed! I am going to stick with my flavors, but I am going to do two round pieces same size frost with buttercream frosting or maybe cream cheese...not sure yet, and make wilton's royal icing recipe to decorate with the new tips I just got in the mail today! White base, with red and blue stars and maybe a few fireworks! I feel confident that this will turn out much better. I am still going to attempt the marshmallow fondant at some point...just not tomorrow. So with that Happy 4th ya'll.

Much love and Happy Cooking Friends,
Amelia
PS. I will also write a blog about how the cakes about killed me because I put way too much batter in one and not enough in the other! Ay yi yi!!