a fire station birthday & burning building cake

NBoy's Birthday was a flame-filled fun event! The theme was: Fire Station Birthday. The cake was a "burning building" complete with mini-firetruck cakes decorated by the birthday boy for his guests, and the "burning building" birthday cake was his request.......and my creative adventure!

After some thorough internet research, a lot of hours spent watching Ace of Cakes, and YouTube decorating examples, I felt brave enough to try out my first large layered cake, and first fondant cake. I started with five base layers of this vanilla cake recipe {I love this cake recipe because it comes out with a nice brown crust, and isn't crumbly- although it is still moist from the sour cream}. To keep the shape easy and consistent, I baked each layer in an 8x8 cake pan.
I filled it with a raspberry filling, and crumb iced the whole tower with whipped buttercream frosting. After it crusted over, I added four stabilizer pillars to the cake interior. And wow- I'm glad I did- since the final product was quite heavy! I "built" the roof from a batch of cake baked in a jelly roll pan, and eyeballed it to size as I went. After crumb coating and refrigerating, all the cakes, I whipped out my pre-made, purchased fondant. I used Wilton's black fondant for the roof, and their brown for the bricks. The red fondant is Ace of Cakes brand, now sold at Michael's craft store {use your %40 off coupon, and it's not so pricey}!
There was no way I was going to attempt fondant "flames" so I dug through my craft paints and printed off some "flame" outlines. I painted the flames, let them dry and glued them to toothpicks. **On a side note, I really loved how those turned out! The craft paint made the flames look shiny, and the paper curled a bit while it was wet giving some more movement to the flames.**

Don't look too closely at the fondant- but I must say, for my first try- I was pleased with the outcome...and it helped that the building exterior was supposed to look like a cracked, falling apart, on-fire, building! Mr. M. suggested the brick effect (which was assisted by an Ace of Cakes brand, plastic brick fondant press, also purchased at Micheals), and Auntie S. helped me master the fondant details to pull it all together. Lastly, I added the green ivy to cover up the cracks and imperfections in the fondant {the green ivy is regular icing}.

Birthday BoyN and I, made the car cakes together using a similar car cake pan to this one from Nana D. We iced and decorated those with some NBoy selected frosting and candy.



Of course, most importantly, the Birthday Boy loved the cake {especially when we added the REAL fire with candles}, making this mommy's heart very happy & the whole celebration a sweet success!!