Fondant for Beginners, by a Beginner!

Tomorrow is the big Star Wars birthday party. Luckily, my mom is visiting to help me make the cake!

This is my second attempt at a fondant cake (I'm a miserable failure with buttercream icing). My first was a rousing success, so I decided to give it a try for a party!

If you've never tried this before, you should. It's fun, and easy....take a little time though!

I put together a few batches of icing Wednesday evening....so they would be ready. Marshmallow fondant is better if you make it in advance. It gives any small clumps of sugar a little time to dissolve.

We baked three 9x13 cakes (from a box...I'm making fancy icing here, what more can you ask for!) yesterday so they would have plenty of time to cool.

Today we went in search of a cake box and put the sucker together.

First, I cut one of the cakes in half and trimmed the edges. Slap a blob of icing on the cake board (this keeps your cake from sliding around your board). Put down one half, a layer of icing, and the other half. We're using chocolate cake with chocolate icing, because that's what the birthday boy requested.

I then give the whole rectangle (this will be the handle) a thin covering of icing, just like a crumb coat on a traditional cake. This will give you something to make your fondant stick to the cake and will also help your finished project to look nice and smooth.

Now would be the time to color and roll out your fondant for the handle. I decided to be very fancy with this cake and make the handle silver (they make this really cool silver powder that you can brush on). I colored white marshmallow fondant grey to give it a good color base. Roll flat, cover your cake, and cut off the excess. This is when I brushed the edible silver powder on.

The actual sword part of this cake was tricky. Each 9x13 cake is cut in half longways , then shaped to look like a sword. Do the same layering trick. (Blob of icing, cake, layer of icing, more cake.) You may want to cover the adjoining part before you put the crumb coat of icing on (the handle you've already covered in fondant). Regular icing is hard to wipe off fondant! Then cover this part in fondant (I used a light green).

Then I used little bits of chocolate marshmallow fondant dyed black to the accessories. I just rolled them flat, and cut them out with aa pizza cutter.

The final thing I did was twist pieces of the black and grey together to make a rope to make the bottom of the cake look finished!

It's not a professional cake by any means, but we really like it. It's still missing the "Happy Birthday" letters. (Ermm, the cute little letter molds ate then right up. I'm just going to pipe letters on in the morning with black gel icing.)

So here is it......a LIGHT SABER CAKE!