My baby is finally 1 year old! She had a wonderful birthday party filled with family and friends. Her party theme was storybook fantasy (blame her mom for recently re-reading Lord of the Rings and watching Game of Thrones). I wanted her party cake to look like an old time of fairytales (a la Grimm brothers).

9" x 6" pound cake iced and filled with Swiss meringue buttercream

8" x 5" chocolate cake iced with chocolate cream cheese frosting

cake boards covered with fondant

color washed with brown airbrush coloring

painted with gold luster dust + Everclear

Unfortunately, I didn't take any photos of the cake in progress (I had a lot to do!), but I can explain the process. I have Sharon Zambito's Book Smarts DVD (which I love) but didn't quite do that same process for this cake.

The book covers were fondant covered cake boards (2 per book). I textured the fondant after covering the boards by crumpling up the foil, flattening it out, then pressing it against the fondant.The cakes were sitting on a cake board slightly smaller than the book covers. A strip of ivory fondant textured with an all-thread rod covered 3 sides of the cake.A strip of fondant for the spine was sandwiched between the cake and the covers. The brown fondant spine accidentally didn't cover all of the cake at one end but instead of re-doing it, I left it looking elder than originally intended! This is probably the first time my crummy fondant job actually worked in my favor!I diluted brown airbrush coloring with Everclear and "washed" the fondant to make them look dingy. The embellishments were gold luster dust mixed with Everclear painted on. Specifically for the text, I had printed out "Happy Birthday Ezri" with Ruritania font on a piece of paper. Then I free-handed painted the letters using the printout as a reference. That's why the spacing is inconsistent for the different words!The cake was put right in the middle of the serving table surrounded by food. Apparently, some people didn't realize what it was and were really confused why I (of all people) didn't have any cake!Source here