Award-winning "Back To School" Cake

This was the cake I had entered in the "Sweet Treats Cake Competition" at Colnia, NJ. I received an 'Honorable Mention' award for this one. This was my first cake competition ever. The cake competition was actually a fund-raiser for the Colonia Middle School, so I had thought of making a "Back to School" cake for it.

The basic cake was a vanilla cake with buttercream frosting. I had used the box mix for baking the cakes, but I had 'doctored' it for the density of the cakes for the tiers to remain sturdy and not crack. I had found this way from this link  http://baking911.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=cakebaking&action=print&thread=2163 I had used the recipe for Extended Pound Cake. It turned out pretty good but it was more crumbly. I managed to frost the cake but it took a lot of time.

The cake decorations are all made out of modeling chocolate. The crayons, pencils, rulers, calculators, report cards everything is chocolate. Also the school bus details are created using the modeling chocolate. It took me around 4 days to bake the cakes and the chocolate decorations from scratch; but it was all worth as this was my first award winning cake!!

Angry Birds Cake

This was the cake I made for a 3-yr-old girl who simply loves "angry birds". She is allergic to milk and so her mom had got me the non-dairy frosting. It was basically a two-layered cake with the bottom layer German chocolate and the top one vanilla and the whole cake was covered in the non-dairy frosting. The frosting was Duncan Hines Frosting Creations tub. We were going to use the angry birds edible image on the cake. I shaded the sky to go along with the image. I used the tip#12 for the sky with different shades of blue using one at a time. For the grass I used the grass tip. The edible image was added about 1 hour prior to the party. The only problem I noticed was that due to the uneven surface of the sky below, the image cracked a little bit after it merged into the cake. So from next time onward I am going to keep the surface below the image plain.