Graduation Cakes

I thought I'd try my hand at baking some graduation cakes this year. A friend asked me if I would make theirs -- they were graduating from the University of Iowa.

Here is a picture of my first attempt at working with fondant. Not so good! It was too dry -- and I realized if you go by the recipe exactly then you are spelling disaster. Fondant is more about feel than precise ingredient amounts.

I put the cake mix into a round bowl to create the bottom part of the mortar board. And then added a 10x10 cake pan for the top. It ended up being too heavy to work. I needed a cake board to support it. But in the end decided I would try something else.

My second attempt at the cakes was with a mortar board cake form. The fondant this time turned out MUCH better and much easier to work with. I didn't make a full batch and as you can see from the images below, I wasn't able to completely cover the cake. I liked this one ---but would probably need to trim the cake a bit more underneath to create more dramatic lines in the shape of the hat. In the end I didn't end up using this one either!

I decided that I enjoyed working with fondant but not necessarily as a cover for the cake. So I made two large sheet cakes (18x12x2), covered them in butter cream frosting and then decorated them with icing and fondant!
Once I had all of the icing and trim on the cake, I started to decorate. The first cake, I cut a hawkeye logo out of yellow fondant adn placed on the cake. Initially, I was going to make a black icing oval on the butter cream icing and then put the logo on top of that to make it pop more -- but then I realized I didn't have much icing left and I didn't want to chance it. In the process, I ended up making a little bit of a mess of the white icing -- not as smooth in the background as I would have liked -- but at least the logo looks good! :)
On the second cake I decorated with a plastic mortar board. I also changed the trim from yellow on the top and black on the bottom.
I decided to add a little more trim around the mortar board.
I rolled a diploma from yellow fondant, and added black icing for the bow.

I wrote Congrats Dawn with the star tipped icing bag. I was running out of time. I wanted to change the tip in my icing bag so that I could top the star tipped yellow lettering with a straight line tip in black icing -- which would have cleaned up the lettering and made it pop more...but in the end this worked out.


Here are some images from the buffet meal served at the graduation -- thanks to the help of Scott, and Sheena! I couldn't have finished it all without you!