Firetruck Birthday Cake

My good friend Jenna's two son's birthdays are on the same day, but 3 years apart.  So for their 4th and 1st birthday party, we made this adorable firetruck birthday cake!!!!  Whoa!!!  We went through an entire county's egg stock to make this cake!!!! I have not had much experience in baking.  And so far my chocolate filling and frosting have been a complete disaster!!!  I have given up on chocolate until my neighbor Teresa comes over here the next time to supervise.  She swears she has a no fail recipe!!! 

The firetruck, hydrant and hose were all cut with the Paper Dolls for Everyday cartridge.  The red, orange and yellow fondant was precolored and Jenna did a great job adding the black food color to the white fondant. I thought it would come out all marbled looking like before, but it didn't.  Who knows???  With fondant and gumpaste you can only use the gel based food color like you find in any craft store, not the water based like in the grocery store.  I wait for the baking supplies to go on sale and add a 20% off entire purchase coupon on top of it.  The baking supplies hardly ever go on sale, so when they do, you gotta stock up!!!  Every now and again you get super deals that way!!! 

The fondant is still coming out shiny, but when on the cake, it is not noticable.

The font layers were cut from the Birthday Cakes cartridge! (notice the T in the top lefthand corner, I had to go back and add it after cutting the first part, oops!!!)

The flames were cut from the Going Places cartridge.  It was designed on my Gypsy, which is a handheld Cricut design tool that work with all the cartridges.  It was a campfire with log design, but with the Gypsy you can hide certain parts of an image and not cut that portion, so I hid the log part because I just wanted to use the flames as a border for the cake.  Super cool feature!!! 

Ta-da!!!!  It turned out pretty cute, huh???  Jenna then added letter candles to spell out her son's names and a few extra plastic fireman theme decorations.  We just rolled up the extra fondant into balls for the bottom portion of the border!!!  Some people think it looks like M&M's or some other candy, which is not a bad idea, actually!!!  It was such a fun party and the cake even tasted pretty darn good.  Thank goodness!!!  Thanks Jenna for letting me take part in creating these special memories for your family.  I had so much fun working with you on this!!!