Delicious Dreams and Cake Realities

I always think cake decorating is easy, until it's hour 6, the kitchen is 80 degrees, the fondant is gooey, the frosting is melting and the 4-tier cake is leaning worse than that stupid tower in Pisa. At the end of all that crap, it looked like a kindergartner came over to decorate it.

The quest for this beautiful design turned monstrosity started last year. Before we signed up for who we would make birthday cakes for at work, I heard about the first year one of my co-workers worked at our branch. Apparently no one had signed up for her birthday treat and when someone finally did, instead of writing their name on the sign up form they wrote her name and for a moment she was under the impression that she would have to provide her own birthday treat. Hearing about this, and knowing what it's like to have people forget or not appreciate your birthday, I felt compelled to do something amazing this year for her treat.

The first concept was something simple, yet delicious but it soon blossomed into a 4 tiered cake (fun-fetti and strawberry) with Rainbow and Monkey as themes. I utilized basic frosting (vanilla), Runts (the fruit hard candies) and homemade marshmallow fondant.

Fondant quickly became Fondon't in my book. This was almost a complete disaster. I made a way too large batch which would not take to the color I wanted (brown for monkeys) and ultimately only made 1 pasty fat man with a tail who sweats when he gets too warm (the fondant gets gooey when the temperature is too high). After hours trying to make the fondant monkey I finally decided to still use it. I wanted to have a joyful monkey sliding down a rainbow but it kind of fell short.

I made a pretty successful rainbow with light and a prism but the conceptual design fell short of impressing the cake eaters, so my second design was made with colored sugar.

There's not a whole lot more I can say, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves:

So here's a good side shot of the cake. You can see the rainbow, which was pretty decent and the runts which sunk down the side of the frosting as it melted.

Here's the top of the cake, what's that? A fat and sweaty man with a tail?

I think it must be a fat and sweaty man with a tail sliding down that rainbow.

Yep, he's pretty fat and sweaty. Better luck next time.

Oh, but the inside is a rainbow as well, how delicious!