Holly Christmas Cake

This cake was one I took with me to a celebration with my in-laws. My husband has a large family, so I made a 10-inch cake. When asking my husband what kind of cake I should make, he says, "Something Christmas-y." Well, most Germans only eat cinnamon around Christmas time, so I made vanilla cake and swirled in about half a cup of cinnamon and sugar into the batter before baking. Then I frosted it with Swiss meringue buttercream flavored with cinnamon. It was divine.

I didn't actually have a specific design in mind when I started decorating. I decided on a white background and wanted to do a bunch of different things that were especially Christmas-y. My five-year-old gave me a lot of feedback and also helped me decorate.

This is the cinnamon buttercream. The recipe I looked up to find out how much cinnamon to add to my Swiss meringue buttercream I found said 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. I tried that much first and couldn't even taste it. I added more four times. I'm pretty sure it ended up being over a quarter of a cup. I think it was five tablespoons. But it turned out so delicious I wanted to eat the whole bowl full with a spoon.

 This is what my vanilla cake looked like with the cinnamon sugar swirled through it. So delicious.

 I had a problem when looking over my fondant. I only had a tiny bit of red fondant left. I always buy precolored red fondant because it's a notoriously difficult color to achieve with food coloring. I had two small unopened packages of red fondant that I opened and they looked like this. The color was way off. It was more of an orangy-brown. They were rock hard and cumbly. And the smell was off, so I tasted the fondant... and I can honestly say this is the first time ever that I experienced fondant that has literally gone bad. It tasted awful. I don't normally mind the taste of fondant. But this was really disgusting. It got tossed.

 The only problem with not having those two small packages of red fondant was that I literally only had maybe 50g of red leftover. I had originally planned on lining the bottom of the cake with white and red to look a little candy cane-ish. But that was definitely out. I talked it over with Sabrina and we decided to line the bottom with holly leaves instead, because they only need a tiny bit of red.

Having come to that conclusion, I frosted the cake one more time in cinnamon buttercream.

 Then I covered it in white fondant.

 And placed two sizes of holly leaves around the outside. At this point, I knew we desperately needed holly berries. Without the berries, the leaves look a bit like marajuana....

 So, we placed a few holly berries at the bottom of each sprig around the cake.

 I also trimmed an ice cream cone to be about half as tall as usual and covered it with the leftover holly leaves, wrapping them around the cone. And we used Christmas sprinkles to decorate the cake and the side of the cake with. There were gold stars, gold sugar pearls and white sugar pearls.

 Then, I cut out some tiny gingerbread men out of brown fondant, pressed out a few small bows out of dark pink fondant and decorated the surface of the cake with sprinkles as well.

 I think this cake turned out adorable! I mean, there's so much Christmas going on here. The decorations were placed a little bit randomly because of the help my five-year-old lent me, but I still love it, despite its imperfections.

 Merry Christmas from our family to yours.