Day 4: Fondant.

Girl's birthday is coming up in a few short weeks which can mean only one thing...........

Birthday party!!

When I was a kid I always wanted to have a birthday party but we just didn't do that. Don't get me wrong, my birthday was always great. My parents were awesome about making us each feel special every day and certainly for birthdays. They also did something amazing for us for our 13th and 16th birthdays.
But little kid parties were just not happening.
So, I tend to make a big deal about the kid's parties.
Especially since it means I get to bake. And not only bake, but decorate.
I love to decorate cakes.
Girl's cake last year was too easy. She had a Nightmare Before Christmas themed party so I just made one of Jack and one of Sally. (Sorry, you'll have to wait for pictures. Maybe later.)
The year before it was Alice in Wonderland. I made a Mad Hatter Hat cake. A 4 tiered monstrosity that tilted at the top just so.
This year, she wants a jungle themed party.
The cake had me stumped for awhile. Snakes are easy to make. The crocodile isn't much of a challenge.
So, I'm working on something special. Sketch to come later. Maybe. It depends on whether I can make the sketch actually look like a cake and not a big blob of nothing.
I'm thinking of a square base layer with 2 round tiers on top. Coat it in green butter cream icing and wrap a simple icing snake around from the bottom to the top. The anaconda of icing snakes.
The tricky part will be the animals (elephant, monkey, whatever else I can come up with) and the trees.
Because for the first time ever, I'm going to work with fondant.
I've always avoided it because of the taste. It's not unpleasant, just boring. And the texture is a little.... eh. Not my favorite.
But I want to do something different and surprising. I bought some fondant today to start working on it. Just for practice since this stuff won't be good by the time her birthday rolls around. It's softer than I realized. But I think it will work. We'll see.
I'll take pictures and you can laugh at my gimpy elephant and mildly distorted monkeys.