Hawaiian Birthday

One of my really good friends from school knows my passion for cake decorating and asked if I would make her birthday cake for her Hawaiian luau. I was stoked. She was my first real consultation. I picked her up after school and we went to Jack-in-the-Box to put some ideas on paper. This is the design we came up with (it was mostly her!)

From this design, I created a really great cake, if I do say so myself. I had so much fun trying new techniques and shaping the cake to what it ended up being.

 This was the front, with the fondant volcano and palm trees sitting on the butter cream water. The volcano was chocolate cake, the water vanilla.

 

For a while, I had no clue how I was going to go about forming the volcano part. I considered just baking a 9"x13" smushing it into the shape of a volcano, but I knew that wouldn't go over well when it came time to cut into it. I couldn't come up with anything that would be good enough. Luckily for me, Mom is great at coming up with ideas. She suggested using one of those giant cup cake pans, the ones where they make a single giant cupcake, and going from there. So I invested in a new cake pan and got a great reaction from partygoers and the birthday girl herself.  

Close ups of the butter cream waves.

 

  

 Close up of the message to the birthday girl.

  

 

I formed the palm trees around a skewer and then had to hot glue the leaves on top so they would stay. I then had to pipe green butter cream around the base of the tree to help smooth the transition from tree to cake. 

 Hand made palm fronds, drying on my cool fondant drying rack that I got to use for the first time!