Harrison Danger Deakins

Harrison (Devin and my nephew) turned one on February 22. He is the freaking cutest kid around with the biggest brown eyes and the sweetest smile. If you don't believe me, you can find out yourself!

This is a video that the talented Lilly McDowell made to commemorate Harrison's first birthday! It's so precious that I've watched it several times (mainly because Ellie has been slightly obsessed with it and thinks that it should be played at her house non-stop).

http://picketfencefilms.blogspot.com/2011/03/harrison-day-in-life.html

He's such a stud and he's ALWAYS happy! Lilly is in my Bunco group and I'm proud to say that she did my wedding video as well! Her work is never a disappointment!

Anyways, Harrison, birthday...back on track! McKenzie trusted me enough to make the birthday cake for Harrison's first birthday. It was a monkey theme and I wanted to make something other than a tiered cake. I've done that tons of times before and I never seem to have time to make cakes anymore so I wanted to challenge myself. I found a cake online that I thought was too cute for words and wanted to use that cake as the inspiration for Harrison's Monkey Cake (I'm not going to post the inspiration photo because it was professionally done and would definitely put my cake to shame)

Here's the end product :)



This was my first attempt at shaping a cake, meaning I made a bunch of cakes, put filling between each layer and then had to carve the shape of the monkey's body out of the tower of cake...not as easy as it sounds but it went off without a hitch! I was surprised at my undiscovered shaping skills.

The problem was in trying to cover the head with the fondant. The head was obviously a circle and gravity wanted to remind of its continual pull on everything including monkey heads made out of cake. The head was one of the last things that I created for the cake so it was late and I was running out of patience. I felt defeated when the head eventually crumbled in my hands. I knew that baking another cake would take close to an hour and I knew that even if I baked a whole new cake, gravity would still crumble that darn head. I sank defeated into the couch and watched an entire episode of Ugly Betty before I had an epiphany. I used to cater weddings and I remembered all of the people that had a layer of their wedding cake made out of Rice Krispy Treats. (Note: this is an EVIL thing to do to caterers or whoever plans on cutting the said Rice Krispy Treat layer because 4 inches of rice krispies simply shouldn't ever be cut!)Bad idea for wedding cakes but GREAT idea for Monkey heads! I knew that I could probably go outside and play baseball with the monkey head which meant that covering the head in fondant would be a "piece of cake." (lame, sorry-I had to!)I was right. The rest of the cake went off without a hitch and I was very proud of the end result considering all of the obstacles I ran into!

The only thing that I would have liked to find out ahead of time would be that the homemade chocolate fondant is a lot drier than the regular marshmallow fondant that I usually make. This made it a lot more difficult to roll out and cover the giant cake. Also, the spots that seemed fine when I covered the cake dried out and cracked a little over night...no biggie but just made my heart hurt a little bit.
It was also good to know that (homemade) chocolate fondant is SO good. McKenzie and I decided that it tasted like tootsie rolls. I may just have to make an extra batch just to make little bite-sized balls of goodness.

One of my favorite sayings about making cakes is, "There's no such thing as a perfect cake, you just have to know how to cover up or fix the mistakes." So, don't get sad when things don't turn out perfect, just get a little creative. I did have to do some damage control. The head was pretty lumpy because the rice krispy treat head was a lot bumpier than cake would have been. I covered most of it up by adding a little baseball cap for the monkey to wear. I also covered up some of the cracks in the chocolate fondant by making a little blankie to drape over the monkey's shoulder.