An early shout-out to spring (and a first stab at fondant).

I'm definitely not a cake decorator, I think this cake makes that clear, but it was definitely fun to make.  I've never used fondant or homemade buttercream frosting before, so it was definitely an experiment.

We had one of those glorious days toward the end of a Minnesota winter when the thermometer reaches 45 degrees and everyone is walking around in jeans and a t-shirt pretending it's totally warm enough to do so. And then a few days later it was 15 degrees again... Winter's not over.

Anyway, the design of this cake is spring-inspired, despite the fact that I probably have another month before I can kiss winter goodbye.

The cake itself is red velvet, my personal favorite.  I am working on changing this particular recipe up though, as it was incredibly dry.  I tried a gelatin fondant recipe (opposed to marshmallow) that called for 8 cups of confectioners sugar in a very small amount of liquid.  Around 7 cups (after 20 minutes of kneading the sugar in) I got the feeling that it was at a consistency that would be easy to work with.  If I had stopped then I might have had better luck in the long run.  I added the 8th cup because I know nothing about fondant.  I've never made it before, never worked with it, and to my knowledge never eaten a cake with fondant.  The resulting fondant rolled out like a dream and was easy to manipulate, but began cracking as soon as I worked it into place. You can easily see these cracks, in addition to one large seam on the picture below. Nothing I could

think of smoothed them out properly, and the seam was the result of too much fondant around the bottom of the cake.

So there are two things I need to work with on fondant- first, I'll try stopping when I think it looks good next time and hopefully it won't be too dry.  Second, I'll roll it much thinner.  Between the butter cream layer and the fondant the cake had about 1/4in of frosting and was sickeningly sweet.

I used a basic buttercream recipe for the blue piping shown and as a dirty-icing layer under the fondant.  For the other icing I used powdered sugar and water with food dye.  Pretty basic and easy to use, but it set hard as a rock.  I'll definitely be working on my decorative skills as well, but my little sisters didn't seem to mind at all!

-Beth