My First 'Real' Cake

My friend, Tonya, is one of the most amazing women I've ever met. She's an incredible friend, awesome hairdresser, great mom and all around wonderful person. So when she asked me to make her daughter's Sweet 16 cake last October, and told me what she was looking for, I just didn't have the heart to tell her, 'No, I've never done a cake like that and I can't do it....I'm scared.' So I got together with my friend, Crystal, who is a self-taught fondant Goddess, and we made a trial run cake. Then the week before the party I made another one...the second looked better than the first so I thought 'Hey, maybe I can do this after all??' The picture here is the end result. Sure it's not as great as some of the 'mad hatter' cakes that you can find online, but I thought, for a first try, it wasn't too bad. Obviously I passed on the fondant and hand-piped the zebra stripes. It took a while, but I thought that they turned out pretty good - kind of funky, and less uniform than what I came up with when I tried the fondant. It was exhausting, and I think I spent about 30 hours on the final cake - working late into the night after work two nights in a row and all day that Saturday. But seeing the look on Tonya's face, and hearing how happy her daughter was with it, made it so worth it. This is when I discovered that there are very few cake catastrophies that a trip to Michael's or Hobby Lobby won't fix. And it's also when I discovered that free-handing colored white chocolate for letters and numbers looked much better than trying to use stencils and colorflow icing (for me anyway.) I think each cake has the potential to result in new mistakes - which, in turn, will result in new lessons learned. I would eventually give fondant another chance...months later....but you'll have to keep reading to see how that turned out.