COOKING: Book Birthday Cake

On Saturday, I made my mother's belated birthday cake. It was a pretty giant cake. It was triple chocolate fudge with dark chocolate icing and cream cheese icing on the sides to look like paper. The whole cake was fashioned to look like an old, tattered version of her favorite book, Persuasion by Jane Austen. The left side was the title page and the right featured her favorite quote from Captain Wentworth. The blue chocolate roses were the first time I got to use my rose molds and I was very impressed with them!

Everything that could go wrong on this cake did. The fondant made me want to throw the whole project out so I had Bill roll it for me. Once it was on the cake and decorated, it kept ripping! There also wasn't enough to do the folded pages on the sides like I had wanted to do. The ink in the food dye pen kept running out even though it was brand new (it kept drying from the fondant) and my icing pages were mingled in chocolate crumbs. =( Next time, if I ever dare to make this cake again, it'll be vanilla and I'll freeze it first.

This monster was a labor of love. It took about 8 hours of work until it was finished, and then I had to tinker with some of the details again in the morning, which meant waking up extra early before church to try and make things work. I nearly cried when I smushed a bit of the page icing right outside of my mom's house!

Anyway, here's the pictures of it: