Another Practice Round

Fortunately, I have another close friend with a child's birthday prior to my own daughter.  This cake was inspired by Bella Cupcakes and the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 

Once again, I obtained a great deal of help from my friends for this one.  In fact, I didn't even bake the cake or make the frosting!  We had a "party" one evening where we made all of the pieces for the top (all the caterpillar ate on Saturday) and side of the cake.  It was a lot of fun.  We used gumpaste for the pieces on the top.  This was my first experience with this.  It dries out much quicker that fondant.  I've since learned that a combination of fondant and gumpaste typically works best.  You get a little bit slower dry time, but you get the drying quality (over time) of gumpaste.  The circles for the side of the cake were made by marbling different colors we had leftover from the pieces we made of the top.  We then rolled it out and cut it with the large end of piping tips.  It turned out to be an excellent idea as my fondant job (white) on the cake was horrible at the bottom.  This covered up my many imperfections.

It was killing me that all of the fruit was left of the cake.  So I had to make a piece of fruit for each day that the caterpillar ate.  I used a straw to put a hole through each one.  I then had to make cupcakes for them to sit on.  The kids really liked eating the mini fruit.

Here we are trying to randomly place the dots on the cake.  It wasn't really that random as we didn't want similar colors touching.  We were also looking for the circles with the best marble look.  We had dozens more dots than we needed.  This is why you see them placed all around the cake for the display.