Making Present Cakes

You have seen the results in another post so here I have the whole project laid out if you are interested.
Basically you bake a cake and then put a present inside it before frosting it with fondant. This is a picture diary of how I did it.

Originally I was planning on making a cake for each of my family members for Christmas. My sister and her husband couldn't make it to Mom's for the holiday so I only made two of them; one for Mom and one for my brother.

I split the first cake mix into a round and a square cake. Those were combined into one cake, the round cake would be the bottom and the square cake was the top, since I ended up trimming the square one to match the bottom, I realize now that I should have made two round cakes, but I was experimenting.

The second cake mix was made into one large cake that I cut in half to be the top and bottom. The basic process is the same for both so you will get the idea for both of them.

The round cake is Mom's, the miniature teapot set is the present for her. She has collected a few teapots, so I thought this was a cute present.
I cut a hole in the middle of the cake and then put it on the cardboard covered foil bottom, which turned out to be too small and flimsy. I fixed that before I went further. The teapot was put inside a sandwich bag and placed inside the round cake. The square cake was first leveled off and then set on top of the round one and trimmed to fit the round base.



You can see the beginnings of the trimmings in the container at the top of the picture. I used those as another dessert by breaking up the pieces and mixing them with cool whip and canned cherries mix.

The fondant frosting was made and colored with a lot of powdered sugar and elbow grease. The last time I did this I made marshmallow fondant, this time I had glycerin so I made it that way. It was a lot easier and pretty good too. The only problem I had was in the colors. I need to make them brighter. These seemed dull to me. I added more coloring, but the cornstarch that I used to keep the mix from sticking bleached it back out again.

So anyway, after I got the color mixed I rolled out the fondant and wrapped the present.
I forgot to put a nice layer of regular frosting on Mom's cake before I put the fondant on, which made the cake pretty dry when we had a piece. We didn't have any ice cream either, that might have helped, but a nice buttercream would have been great.

This final picture shows you both cakes. I wrapped the one to look like two seperate presents tied with a ribbon. I cut a ribbon of the fondant and ran it around the bottom of the cake and then tucked it in between the two layers. Then I rolled out the top covering and tucked it in too. The ribbons were just rolled out a little thick and layed out on edge to get some depth.

I think they turned out okay. Kind of folk artish, but that is my style.