Cowboy Cake

My oldest sister asked me to make a cake for her son for his birthday.  Naturally, I asked my nephew what he wanted for his 5th birthday cake.  He responded, "I would like a cowboy on a horse."  Okay!  Wheels started turning, I started searching the web for what was out there.  This was not going to be a huge gathering, the cake did not have to be huge.  We were actually going to be celebrating his birthday along with Thanksgiving, so people were not going to be eating a ton of cake.  The cake would also need to be gluten free, due to some family allergies, which is a little trickier to work with.  Challenge accepted!

 I used a coloring book page to create the cowboy out of fondant about a week ahead of time.  I cut out templates for each color on wax paper and used that to create the horse and cowboy.  I came back and added details with an edible marker.  I tried to use some layering to make him a little more dimensional.    There is a solid white layer of white fondant behind the entire piece to glue (edible) all of the pieces to.  There are a pair of lollipop sticks sandwiched between the white and brown to hold the horse upright into the cake.

Four layers of gluten free chocolate cake with raspberry buttercream.  I covered it in blue fondant.  I then covered the top with green royal icing.  I could have used buttercream here, but was hoping that the royal icing would help hold the horse into place.  It worked perfectly.  I piped a paisley pattern around the blue using the pattern above as a guide.  In order to keep consistency throughout the pattern, I used a strip of parchment that went around the entirety of the cake and folded it into repeating sections.  I drew the main portions of the design around it and used a pin to mark the cake.  I then came back with royal icing and piped over my pin tracks.

The sherrif star was made with yellow fondant (using cookie cutters -star and 5 small circles) and painted with lemon extract/gold luster dust).  The "5" and "Sawyer" were piped with royal icing.

 Me along with the birthday boy himself!

 He was most excited to eat the cowboy and horse. 

It was delicious!