Ten Little Ladybugs Cake

A few weeks ago I asked my Facebook cake "followers" to propose a cake challenge for me. Honestly most of the suggestions were pretty easy and I really wanted to try something new that would be difficult for me. My boys have a book called Ten Little Ladybugs that I love, mainly for the illustrations. I've always been intruiged by them and have been thinking: "how awesome would it be to make this book into a cake?!" Mind you, I am not an artist! So I figured this was the perfect challenge for me and I decided to make a cake based on the ladybug book.

This is an easy and fun idea for a cake that doesn't require a lot of cake decorating supplies. I made the characters in small spurts, since this was just a "for fun" cake idea. So after three weekends of painting the fondant characters little by little, they were finally finished. I started the process by tracing the outlines of the characters out of the book onto parchment paper. Yes, I traced! As I said, I'm not an artist! :D Then I cut them out.

I then used the parchment cut-outs as a pattern to cut the characters out on rolled out white fondant. I laid the fondant out onto parchment paper and let them dry for a couple of days before coloring. Drying time will depend on the humidity in your area. In my case drying takes longer!

Then I began coloring the fondant characters with petal dust. I just used the dry petal dust, but if you add lemon juice or vodka to the dust you can have more of a watercolor effect to your coloring. I prefer the flexibility that the dry petal dust offers though. The painting I did was freehand.

The butterfly and the bird were not really attractive illustrations in the book in my opinion. I think this was reflected in my painting skills too. ;D

    

The rest turned out really well! I even surprised myself! (The frog actually looks better on the cake because I got some dark green petal dust after taking this photo.)

 

  

I also cut out the ladybugs using round cutters and painted them, I just didn't take pictures of those. Or the flowers!

Then I took some 10" and 12" cake forms....these are styrofoam cake dummies....and put some orange buttercream on it. WHAT?! Yes...I said it. This isn't a real cake! :D Let me tell you, dummies are a pain to ice with buttercream!

To finish the characters I added black royal icing to the ladybugs and melted chocolate antennae and legs for the other bugs. I piped these onto parchment paper, stuck them in the fridge for 15 minutes to harden, and then adhered them to the fondant with more melted chocolate.

And there we have it, a cake that looks just like a story book!

Piece of cake!! (Or styrofoam...you know...) ;)

This cake is now also featured on the Cake Appreciation Society's Facebook page in their Sweet Bug Life photo album!

https://www.facebook.com/#!/photo.php?fbid=247879305247804&set=a.247109361991465.50988.158099100892492&type=1&theater