sweet sixteen cake

last week, a family friend's daughter turned 16 and she hired us to make a birthday cake for her daughter's sweet sixteen birthday party!

the birthday girl requested a tiered vanilla cake with vanilla frosting, covered in teal fondant and white polka dots.  she also wanted a "16" cake topper with a soccer ball on it since she loves to play soccer.

so, we got to work and made a cake!  the bottom tier was a 3-layer 10 inch cake and the top tier was a 2-layer 6 inch cake.  all of the cake was vanilla, and there was vanilla buttercream frosting between each of the layers and on the outside of the cake.  we covered the cake in teal fondant which ryan tinted himself.  (he's so good at color mixing when it comes to cake decorating.  we call him our "color mixologist.")  we cut four different sizes of polka dots out of white fondant and adhered them to the cake with buttercream frosting.

we molded the cake topper entirely out of fondant so that it would be edible.  we used the same teal fondant that we covered the cake with and brushed it with edible luster dust for some extra pizzazz.  we used one of our white polka dots as the base for the soccer ball and cut the hexagons out of black fondant.  we stuck shish kabob skewers into the cake topper to support the numbers and to hold the cake topper on top of the cake.

it was absolutely massive by the time we put the whole thing together (and it was crazy heavy too)!  since we had to travel with the cake, we didn't stick the cake topper into the top of the cake until we arrived at the birthday girl's house.  we were really pleased with how the cake turned out, but more importantly the birthday girl loved it too!

love, laurie