Where Happiness Comes From

I'm not accustomed to covering irregular shapes with fondant, so this seemed like a good learning experience.

Not wanting to stick with flat grey (and worried that the covering might go badly, I decided to create a visualisation of the items of happiness. This required an awful lot of fondant modelling, so I nearly broke my back hunched over the table making miniature cupcakes, kittens, sporks etc. I decided to base my kittens on the ones I made in a previous threadcake (The Original Copycat). The sunshine had me a little puzzled (I think they look more like flowers than anything else), but it all turned out ok in the end. I'm currently without a lot of my decorating supplies, so when it came to creating "fairy dust", I was a little stumped. In the end, I put some icecream sprinkles in a blender and mixed in a little "snowflake" lustre dust to make it sparkle. As for glitter, I only had it in black, but I think it worked

When it came to carving the cake, I had to bake a pretty big cake (I was being lazy again and used a packet mix). I printed off the design and used it as a carving template. I quickly realised that the horn and the legs were creating a problem as they were starting to break off as I added the buttercream. I decided to cut my losses and add them in fondant form once the rest of the cake was covered

As soon as all the fondant work was done, I scratched the dividing lines into the fondant and stuck some white icecream sprinkles onto them. Then the fun part, the decorations. I mixed some sugar glue and started sticking everything down. After experimenting with making fondant gummy bears, I realised I suck at making fondant gummy bears, so I sourced some mini gummy bears instead. Getting the sporks to stay on without falling off or cracking was a special kind of hell, but eventually it was all done.

Since it's box mix, it was never going to taste fantastic, but I'm pretty sure the sugar high from all the fondant made up for it