Building Your Birthday Cake - July 2007

This is a cake I made for my dad's birthday.  He is very good at building things, so I thought I'd make him building his cake.  :)

No, he didn't really do it.  :)  He wanted to, but we still wanted to eat the cake.  :)

:)  Hey, when you're made out of sugar you've got to keep in shape!  :)

I actually got the inspiration for my dad's cake from a cake I saw on the Charm City Cakes website earlier in the year (2007).  It was LEGO chefs constructing a wedding cake, so cute!  [For those who don't know, Charm City Cakes is Duff Goldman's (Ace of Cakes) bakery.]  Below are a couple photos of their cake.  (Thank you Charm City Cakes, specifically Mary Alice, for the pictures!  :) )

(Charm City Cakes's LEGO Construction Wedding Cake)

It was such a cute cake and such a neat idea, but it didn't really fit for anyone in my family at the time.  Then I started thinking of my dad building things, and I realized that I could modify it to fit for him... So, I did.  :)

I made the cake and iced it with chocolate buttercream.  Everything else on the cake is made from fondant.  I rolled out some brown fondant for the top of the cake.  Then I got some foam letter stamps that I had and imprinted the 'HAPPY BIRTHDAY' letters into the fondant while it was still soft.  I put it on the cake and trimmed it where necessary.  (This is the first time I used fondant for anything other than decorations, so it's not perfect, but I'm learning :) .)  For the 'wooden' planks around the sides of the cake I rolled out some brown fondant and cut it in strips the height and width I needed.  The four remaining planks would have completed the outside of the cake, but I left them off to make it look like he was still in the process of constructing it.  I rolled and cut the yellow fondant and put it on part of the top and side of the cake to look like he was painting it.  I thinned a little brown food coloring to paint the wood grain lines on the brown fondant.  Then I took a toothpick and broke off the pointed end.  I dipped it in some black food coloring and dotted the 'nails' onto the planks on the side of the cake.

All the tools I shaped out of fondant.  I wish I would have had more time to do the saw, nail gun, tape measure, and router (yeah, I know it kind of looks like a sander, but it was supposed to be a router that he had used to cut out the letters).  Those tools mentioned were kind of thrown together quickly, so they don't look as good as they could have, but I was running out of time and I at least wanted them on there, so there you go.  :)  To make the sawdust I took some scraps of the brown fondant that I had leftover and chopped them into little pieces, then I just sprinkled them around the sawhorses.

My dad is made out of fondant... not my actual dad (although he is sweet :) )... just the one on the cake.  :)  I put him in one of his favorite kinds of shirts (if you look in the picture of him 'cutting' the cake you'll see that he was wearing one with navy blue sleeves the day of his party - funny), and I even gave his mini version the appropriate tattoos.  :)

-------------------------------
Parties I've linked this post to: