We're All In The Same Boat

The first time I 'went public' with cakes I make was for a celebration at my church.  We had merged two churches and after a year of worship together we were having a party to celebrate our new name and that our merge was finally complete. I know, you're not here for church politics so here's the cake.

I got the idea for this from an old Girl Scout Tee-shirt I used to have. It had three girls, different nationalities all in a boat that resembled the Earth and said "We're all in the same boat". I thought this would be a perfect phrase for our celebration. I did the cake because I had made the decision to start decorating cakes for money and needed a jumping off point (let's call it practice). I also wanted to use fondant and thought I shouldn't charge the first time I did this since I didn't know what the outcome would be.  So I suggested they have cake and I volunteered to make it for free. I used a boxed fondant (from Wilton) for the white base and decorated the rest with regular frosting.

A few lessons I learned here:

1. If you use fondant for cake, don't make a cake that calls for a VERY large sheet of it. It came out okay, but it was really hard to knead a piece that big which made it even more difficult to roll out. If the cake needs to feed lots of people make layers of cake instead of a large sheet.

2. This is a side by side cake. It is two sheet cakes side by side. Though each side was the same brand they ended up baking to different sizes. This was also before I had my Bake Even Strips so they were rounded on top even after trimming them.

3. I need to learn better icing penmanship!

I recreated a smaller version of the cake for the one year anniversary.

This one was not done with fondant, it was half the size and just a little different, but it received about the same amount of praise.