Failure #3527 (Or Something Like That)

With Leo's birthday fast approaching, I decided it was time to start planning the party.  Of course the first priority was to decide on the cake which is the basis for the whole evening, because from the cake comes the theme & from the theme comes the decorations!

Weeell, Ryan & I found an extremely fun cake idea online.  The cake we decided on, however, required fondant icing & that was something I'd never made before.  As we watched the How-To video, I thought that this icing should NOT be called fondant...it should be called FUNdant because it looked sooo fun and easy & it made the cake look sooo good!

We decided a practice run was in order, so Sunday after church I baked a cake.  This next sentence is NOT an exaggeration in any way, shape or form.  EVERYTHING SPIRALED STEEPLY DOWN HILL FROM THE TIME I TOOK THE CAKE OUT OF THE OVEN!

Problem #1:  The cake did NOT come out of the pan in a nice 9x13 rectangle!  (I guess I didn't need 1/3 of the cake anyways!)

Problem #2:  I wanted to do a double layered rectangle cake with a fun filling.  Apparently, cutting a cake into 2 exact rectangles is harder than it looks.  First, I didn't take enough off the top.  Then my measuring must not have been spot on because once those cakes were layered, the bottom was bigger than the top.  Then I tried to cut the double layered cake to make things even...OH SUCH A BAD IDEA!  I gave up in frustration after several attempts of making everything straight!  (I think at this point I had probably lost half of the cake that came out of the oven!)

Problem #3:  Fondant should NOT be named FUNdant!!!  Must have been the recipe we used because it didn't roll out well.  We kept adding powdered sugar & water trying to make it the right consistency.  It didn't work.  Our fondant was not going to be smooth.  We admitted defeat and moved on to the next step.

Problem #4:  We decided to cut pieces of fondant into rectangles & lay them on the cake instead of draping the fondant over the cake.  The cake we were basing our idea off of did this & it looked so cool!  Unfortunately, putting the fondant on in pieces just accentuated the fact that our cake wasn't perfectly rectangle.  Then we couldn't get the sides to come together, even though we pinched it together like we were suppose to!  Once the fondant was on, it didn't lay flat against the sides of the cake, which made our rectangle look even more pathetic!

I think the worst part about the whole ordeal was that I spent 4 hours on this crazy cake & all I got out of it was an EPIC FAIL!  I realized that day that I did NOT miss my calling to be a fabulous cake decorator :)

Now, for all of your enjoyment, I present our perfectly un-rectangular, un-smooth cake!

This isn't the end, however!  We will try again & we WILL conquer! (I hope!)