Happy Birthday to Me!

Friday July 16 was my birthday. I am now 19!
So for my birthday I made myself a cake...I thought it would be a really fun thing to do. I decided to make a 3d cake. I have never made a 3d cake before so I was going into this thing blind. Looking around on google images and other sites, I finally got an idea of what I wanted to do. I wanted to make a 3D ELEPHANT! My brother and I have an inside joke with elephants, which is why I decided to go with that. So then I looked through even MORE pictures to find out how to make one (cause remember, I have never made a 3D cake before...)
I went on cakecentral.com and looked around and stumbled upon the cutest elephant cake ever! Later on a found another site with the same elephant but this time it had instructions. YAY! I had to change a few things cause I don't have any 3D cake molds :( But I think it turned out pretty good for my first 3D cake.
The picture that I had seen used fondant, so it looked pretty and very smooth.  However, I don't really like fondant.  I have never used it before but I am a buttercream frosting fan!  Woohoo! So I decided to just frost mine and hope to get it smooth and it still look cute.

I used a box Cake Mix.  Decorating the cake was going to be hard enough, I didn't want to try and deal with making one from scratch.

So first things first....Bake the Cake.
I made 3 9-inch round cakes.  (I would have used an 8 inch but I didn't have an 8 inch pan. Oh well.)
Bake half of a cake mix in a oven-safe bowl.
I cut the domes off all the cakes.  The bowl cake, I did cute the dome off but not the part that is down in the bowl...cause I needed the curve.  But I did cut the bowl cake in half, so now I have 4 round cakes and one curved cake.
The Wilton WonderMold would do the same affect....but I don't have that.
And I poured some cake batter in a clean empty soup can and baked it.

 (The one on the left is the part I baked in the bowl.  The ones on the right are the 3 - 9 inch round cakes stacked on top of each other.)

Assemble the Cake
Setting one of the round cakes down on my surface, I spread a thin layer of icing on top of the cake.  Then I stacked another round cake on top, iced it, and put on a third one.  See a pattern?  I put the fourth round one on and the bowl one.  However, my bowl wasn't quite as big as my 9-inch round cakes so I took my serrated knife and cut at an angle to help smooth out the curve all the way around.
**If you freeze your cakes for about 45 minutes before you cut them and crumb-coat it, it will help lessen the crumbs.**
Alright, so once the cake is all stacked, put a thin crumb coat icing.  I put it back in the freezer for about 45 more minutes.

While the cake was in there, I made one big rice krispie treat ball for the head and iced it.  I didn't do this but I think I should have, but I should have stuck it in the freezer for a little while as well.  I had some trouble with it later on. I just attached it by sticking some tooth picks in it.

Now for the legs, I took the soup can cake and cut it in half length wise.  Those were the two front legs.  Remember the domes I cut off?  Well, I crumbled some of those up, added a little bit of icing, mixed it all up good, and then molded them how I wanted them to look for the back legs (kind of how you make cake truffles).  So I placed those on the cake too, and gave it a crumb-coat.

For the trunk, I took marshmallows and stuck tooth picks in them to hold them together and curved it to the shape I wanted it.  Then I iced those as well.

Finishing the Cake
Now that everything is placed together and crumb-coated, it is time to finish it.
I applied a thicker final coat of icing.  I tried to smooth it out as good as a could.

 I cut the ears out of paper and wrapped them in plastic wrap to help keep them from getting greasy or anything from the icing.  The eyes are just chocolate chips I stuck on there.  The bow is marshmallows that I painted with food coloring.
And that is how I made my elephant cake ^_^  I Love it!!!


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