School Start Cake

September 12, 2019

This cake was to celebrate my oldest daughter's first day of first grade. It's a huge deal here in Germany. My daughter was vacillating between joy and tears.

But, being the daughter of a cake decorator, she has very detailed ideas of what kind of cake she wants. She wanted the cake to be covered in pink fondant. She wanted school supplies on it, but preferably not on the top. She wanted chocolate cake and Swiss meringue buttercream.

I started out by getting out all colors of fondant.

I wanted to make some colored pencils. I start out by making a snake of the color I'm using and cutting them in short lengths. Then I made tiny little cone shapes of the same color.

Then I get some flesh-colored fondant out and roll it into a cone shape.

I trim the back end to make it flat.

Then I cut off the tip to make it flat, too.

Then, I put some edible glue on the end of the yellow cylinder.

I stick on the flesh-colored cone and add some edible glue onto the tip.

Finally, I add the tiny yellow cone on top.

I made three red, three blue and three yellow colored pencils. I always think of primary colors when I think of back to school.

I also rolled out some thick gray fondant.

And cut out a rough scissor blade shape.

I rolled out some turquoise the same thickness and cut a chunk out to make it fit perfectly.

I used the back of a piping tip to cut out some circles.

Then I cut around them to create the scissor handle shape.

I pressed a line to separate the two handles and smoothed the edges a bit.

Next, I made a notebook with forest green fondant rolled out quite thickly.

I pressed a line into the left side and added a thin, white rectangle of fondant onto the front.

Then I cut out the letters to create the word Mathe with black using a fondant press mold.

I stuck them on using edible glue.

Then I rolled out some purple fondant and cut out the letters to create my daughter's name, Sabrina.

Then I included the letters to the word Einschulung (beginning of school-- it doesn't translate well).

So, now I have these two words.

Now we're finally at cake. This cake is for us, so I baked a six inch chocolate cake. I quickly realized this cake is much too small to include all the decorations I had made. So, I decided to use the cake board to continue the decorations. So, I placed the cake to one side of the board.

Then I crumb coated the cake. This cake was still semi-frozen, so it set up without having to chill it.

So, I immediately frosted the cake again and cleaned up the cake board.

I knew I would need a lot of pink, and I didn't have very much, so I mixed all of my pink fondant with flesh-tone and ivory fondant.

And this was the pink I got. I thought it was lovely.

I rolled out about a third of it, and covered the cake with it.

I smoothed it on and trimmed it down.

Then I rolled out the rest of the fondant that I had. I knew it would be short, but it was the best I could do. I used the cake pan that I had used to bake the cake to trace around it to cut out a cake-sized circle.

I draped this fondant onto the cake board, pressing it into the cake itself.

I didn't like the ragged corners, but I knew if I patched it with the rest of the pink, it would be super obvious that it was patched. Instead, I chose dark purple, a contrasting color, cutting out a side to look like lace and laid it over the corner. I stuck it down with edible glue.

I thought it turned out lovely.

Then I placed the words onto the cake board as centered as I could get it.

I let my daughter choose where to place the rest of the decorations. I put the math notebook onto the left side. I placed the scissors onto the bottom right corner. I talked her into letting me group the pencils into threes with all three colors in it.

I placed some at the bottom, some on top of the cake.

And finally on the right side.

But it bothered me that there was some fondant tearing at the edge of the cake. I made a fondant paste with fondant and a bit of clear alcohol and spread it into the tears.