For the last few years I’ve let my daughter pick out any theme she wants for her birthday cake and this year for her 4th birthday she described that she wanted a sunny day with a rainbow and a horsey…just as the title states! Sounds simple enough right?! (YIKES!). Just so you know my background, I am by no means an experienced cake decorator so when she starts asking for things like this I majorly fret, lol! To put it into perspective, this was her 4th birthday….soo… I’ve made a total of 4 cakes, lol!
I hunted around on the internet a bit looking at some cake pictures and pulled a few ideas until I came up with a plan of my own. There was no way I was going to try and frost this scene with icing so I thought Id give fondant a whirl! I imagined it to be a lot like play dough…and I do daycare for a living so I rock at play dough!!
I bought the pre-made colored fondant variety packs at Walmart along with a fondant tool kit, and went to work molding a horse similar to one I had seen on the Internet. It was a little stiffer than play dough to work with but similar! I used water and a paintbrush to stick my pieces together, and part of a toothpick to attach the horses hat. For the rainbow, I first tried to stick together some rolled up strands of each color, let dry, and stick toothpicks in the ends to hold upright onto my cake. You can see a glimpse of it in the pic with my fondant horse. Long story short…it failed miserably, lol! So then I just made thick long strips of each color and stacked them on top of a purple wedge so it could easily sit on top of the cake without tipping over or falling apart. I also used my left over fondant to make the fence around the bottom of my cake… just rolled it out, made some wood markings and cut out the boards. The number 4 on the side of the cake is made in a similar way.
The cake itself I made a simple vanilla boxed cake mix (3 boxes), separated the batter into bowls and added different colors of food coloring. Then I dumped each color into 2 smaller round cake pans (6 inch) and 2 larger ones (8 inch) and baked accordingly. After cooling, I made a batch of butter cream icing and colored it neon blue for the covering of both tiers, neon green for the grass, and hot pink for the wording. After icing the bottom cakes, I cut off a few dowels and stuck them into my cake to support the weight of the top layer. I put the top layer on a piece of cardboard cut the same size and layed that on my dowels in the bottom layer.
I had forgotten that I wanted to set the top layer back a bit to make room for the words, so I missed a couple of dowels and my cake had a bit of lean to it on the backside, whoops! (FYI.. I layed in bed all night worrying my cake was going to completely collapse by morning… thank goodness it didn’t). After it was stacked and all frosted blue, I changed tips and colors and piped on the grass covering the entire top and around the bottom 2 edges. I used my nifty water and paintbrush trick to tack on my fondant fences around the bottom and my number 4 on the top. I changed colors and tips again and piped on the words HAPPY BIRTHDAY, and then set my horsey and rainbow on top. I also had some premade edible icing flowers I found at Walmart and stuck them here and there, and finally added 4 candles! Ta-Da!
Everyone was pretty impressed at the party, most of all my daughter! She was even more surprised when we cut into the cake and it was all rainbow colors inside too! Made all the hard work well worth it! Wonder what she will want next year, lol?!
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