Game of Thrones Birthday Cakes

My roommate's birthday was August 1st (as is my brother's and his baby girl's!) and I felt challenged to come up with a cake that he would find awesome.  So I asked him what his favorite cake flavor was and he responded yellow.  Which is a color and apparently a legitimate cake flavor.  So what does yellow taste like?  Like cake.  It tastes like cake.  He also like cookies and cream ice cream so I translated that into butter cream icing with Oreo cookie crumbs mixed in.  So that was the easy part, coming up with a theme though...I had so many choices!  We're geeks for heaven's sakes!  Ultimately I settled on recreating the house sigils from the show Game of Thrones.

I have never created a fondant covered cake.  I have always wanted to but it looked hard.  I was right too.  What a pain in the butt!  Baking the cakes was way easy at least.  I have been saving a few empty tin cans to use for another cake project an decided to test them out with this project.  With a liberal dusting of baking spray and flour the cakes came out of their cans very easily.  So cute and petite!  I leveled them out, cut them into 3 layers and stuck them onto some cardboard rounds covered with scrapbook paper and clear packing tape.

I piped some buttercream onto each layer and then crumb coated the cakes and put them into the fridge to crust up a bit before covering them with fondant.

I used some homemade marshmallow fondant because it has a better taste and is easy to make. This doesn't make it easier to use. You've been warned.

Oy vey! Look at that lumpy bumpy mess! I tried and tried but I just hadn't made enough fondant to cover the cakes properly. At least I know what I did wrong so ,hopefully, I don't make the same mistake in the future. I ended up rolling out my fondant and cutting out a long rectangle and then wrapping the cakes. This created a seam but with it facing the back of the wall no one would see this anyways. I then cut out a round piece and covered the top. I tried to hide that seam with some decoration. It came out okay. This was first time working with fondant, okay?

I made the plaques out of royal icing. I just traced a design I found online. The dragon one was the hardest because it was really detailed. Obviously, I opted not to include all that detail for the sake of simplicity.

I glued them onto the tops of the cakes with some more royal icing. I made them slightly too big. I had to break the dragons a little bit to get them to fit right. This was already my second dragon, so no, I was not making another one.

I also learned another valuable lesson. Don't put fondant covered cakes into the fridge. They sweat and get bubbles. Then when placed back in the fridge they crack. Ick!

They did taste delicious though. Mmm, buttercream icing and Oreo cookies. So yum!

Happy Birthday Jason (and Joe and Reilly!).