Well, this is the start of the birthday party pictures. When I started planning Hunter's Cars themed party, I asked Trent what theme he wanted for his birthday. He thought about it for a little while and settled on Diego. Since then the talk had been non-stop about his upcoming party. Needless to say, the expectations for his party in his mind were pretty high. I didn't want to disappoint.
After learning some lessons from Hunter's party, I decided that a cake AND cupcakes were the way to go. I like to do drop-in style parties for the kids. That way they get to see the max amount of friends! (No present required to attend one of our parties!) The downside to this is that people get to leave when they want or need to and end up missing the cake and the goodies that I include on the cake. With the main decorations on the actual cake, if people had to take off early, they could just grab a goodie bag and a cupcake and be on their merry way.
That said, I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted the cake to look like. It didn't look exactly as I envisioned, but I think that the result was pretty outstanding. I started off about five days before the party by making some of the fondant decorations. I still had a lot of left over fondant from Hunter's birthday. I used the rest of the gray colored fondant (used for roads on H's cake) to make big rocks. I dyed some uncolored fondant blue and rolled it out flat. Using that and the boulders I constructed a waterfall and river.
I then tried to make some trees. I added cocoa powder to some of the fondant mixture to make brown. Never do that. Trust me. I just ended up with crumbly fondant. My tree trunks ended up looking more like turds and the leaves I constructed just did not stick to the cocoa fondant. By Friday night I came up with a new plan; make giant leaves! Dyed the fondant green, rolled it out flat, took a knife and made slits in some of them. Others I just made very long and thin. Laid them all out to dry, making sure that they were each bent in a certain way. By the next day they were hard enough to just stick into the frosting. They occasionally broke as I stuck them in, but I just put the broken pieces somewhere else on the cake. Turned out absolutely wonderful. I still had a lot of left over orange dyed fondant from Hunter's cake, too. I took that to make some big orange flowers for the sides of the cake. The only time I would ever put flowers on a boys cake, I assure you.
I made the cupcakes and cake on Friday morning and the buttercream frosting days before that. However, a horrendous thing happened! I ran out of green and blue food dye. I couldn't finish coloring the frosting the needed green of an Amazon forest! I would have had the entire cake frosted and decorated on Friday night had such a travesty not occurred. Instead I had to send out Garrick and my FIL the next morning (in not the most charming way, I might add) to acquire some. Upon their return, I re-whipped the frosting, added the needed food dye and decorated that cake like a boss. A BOSS!
In case you are wondering about the Diego and animal figures, no I did not construct them from fondant. After looking on-line for Diego figure and discovering that they were all $25, I went to the thrift store. I was able to purchase an entire bag of small toys that included a Diego that would be perfect for the cake, for $2.50. AW YEAH! Unfortunately I could not find little plastic animal figures for a cheap price anywhere and had to buy a few tubes at Toys R Us. It was worth it for the final product, though.
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