Making an 18th Birthday Cake

Recently I volunteered myself to make a cake for a boys 18th birthday. It was a bit of a struggle to think of what to make since I don't really know a lot of 18 year old boys and I didn't really have a lot to go on. I could have made a football team cake, but he isn't a football fan. So I decided to settle for something kind of basic, but fun. Then I bought the "Planet Cake" book and found my inspiration.

So here is my step by step for making a cake.

First I prepared some of the decorations - blue and green stars.

Then I covered the board in the blue fondant.

For the cakes I made two chocolate mud cakes and then stacked them together. I was watchin some clips of 'Cake Boss" and it looks as though each of their tiers is actually three cakes stacked...it's the only way to get the heght, and so next time I'm going to try doing three cakes.

Once the cake was stacked and covered with chocolate icing (to try and even out some of the bumps) I cut out two circles of blue fondant and put them in the middle of the cake - this is to make the explosion type thing in the middle.

In between the last photo and the next photo I got a little bit "in the zone" and forgot to take photos of each step!
So what I did inbetween the photos was:

1. Cover the cake with White Chocolate fondant icing (which was actually a little difficult to work with, it wasn't as pliable as the other fondant I've used before)


2. Trim the excess fondant and smooth out the icing


3. Cut some slits on the top of the cake and peel back for the 'explosion'. This was definitely easier said than done. It didn't work as it was supposed to, but I fixed it by cutting out some blue triangles so that it looked ok


4. Put the fondant ribbon on the cake


5. Put the star decorations on the cake

And viola!

Next I had to insert the "18" candles in the middle and fill it in so that it looked better. I added a couple of those edible metallic beads and some luster dust to make it look a little bit more celebratory. This is the finished product: what do you think?