Making A Birthday Cake Tiff Style

I decided to make a cake!!

I have no idea where my sister-in-law found this cake...I think she found it on pinterest???

My sister-in-law Brenda wanted a cake for my niece Kylie's "2" birthday party. Kylie loves Dora and since I love cooking I decided to make one for her. My first impression was to just pay someone to make it so I decided to ask a good friend at my work that makes cakes part time. She knows that I have been wanting to learn to make cakes like this so she invited me to come to her house on our off day, which happened to be the day before the birthday, and make the cake for the party.  I had no prep time and did not practice. This was the first time I ever made a cake to this extreme. It took us 6 hours total....and the cakes were already baked and ready to get icing. Yes it took us 6 hours to icing and decorate a cake. It was soooo worth it!

First you have to trim the sides of the rough edges and cut off the top to make it flat.

Next you prep your icing. We used gels to color the buttercream icing. You can buy buttercream by the gallons from Sam's Club.

Next  you pipe the colored icing onto the sides of the cake.

Icing the top as well

Then center it out with a scraper.

Use a roller to smooth the edges and sides while getting all the bubbles out. It gives it a much more smooth and polished look. Once this is done you have to let the cake and icing set for a few minutes. I started coloring the second icing, green. I also started prepping my fondant for the cut outs on the cake. My battery started going dead on my camera and I forgot my charger so the pics get a little scarce after this.

Place the layers and icing them the same way with the blush pink.

Here is yours truly trying to icing the top layers.

Once the cake is all rolled, icinged??,  and ready you have to let it set. This is when we got busy with the fondant.

Each of these fondants had to be mixed to get the exact pastel colors. I bought premade fondant from Michael's in neon colors and then added white fondant and color gels to get the colors we needed. I bought the Dora figurine from Target bakery. They sell them for $7. 

Here is the final product before I left to put it in my trunk. I was a nervous wreck. I kept thinking that it would fall apart or fall over but it traveled well. It did shift a little on the top but I was able to smooth it out.

Here is the final product. I added some stars in the background using fondant, icing, and some wires.