Dandy Lions

I had a blast creating this cake! I loved the Dandy Lions shirt and knew it would be perfect for me to practice the chocolate method I've been working on lately. To make the lion heads, I traced the original design, scanned it onto my computer, enlarged it, printed it, covered it with parchment paper and then piped melted wafer chocolate over top, trying to match the original as carefully as possible. Then I covered the outline with a background of white and tan chocolate to make each lion a solid piece (by the way, I made the backgrounds bigger than just the outlines because I wanted to give the illusion of the petals being blown away), and peeled the parchment paper off to make a flat image. It was important to me to make the cake entirely using edible materials, so I used straight green candy canes as the stems. I kinda wished they were longer so I could have made the back row of lions taller, but that's the only size I could find them in, oh well. I wanted it to look like the dandy lions were really flowers growing in a field, so I made the cake chocolate (same color as dirt!) with green (vanilla) buttercream. Then I made chocolate grass and carefully laid it on the side of the cake. I added some additional grass on the top of the cake so it didn't look like the dandy lions were floating in nothingness. I couldn't figure out what angle was the best to take pictures of the cake, so I took about 100 different ones! These are the few I thought were the best. I think overall it took me about 12 hours or so to put the whole thing together, but they were 12 really fun hours! Eating it with my family was pretty fun too ;)