My first zebra print cake....

So a co-worker of mine asked me to make this cake for her daughter's 11th birthday.  I was super excited yet nervous because it was in fact going to be my first zebra print cake.  Thankfully though my co-workers daughter printed out some pics of several she liked and I choose her most favorite cake as the one to conquer.  With every cake I bake the first thing I must do is of course make the fondant.  Which, as I've stated before is a very messy task, at least for me it is.  I make a marshmellow fondant which is just basically just a bag of melted marshmellows, a little water, and a lot of confectious sugar.

The cake was a simple white one with buttercream icing.  For the bottom tier I used an 8 inch round and for the top tier I used 6 inch rounds.  After baking the bottom tier I covered it with white fondant.  I then colored some fondant black for the zebra print.  I originally bought a zebra stencil hoping I could just outline the print but that ended up not working out because my tools were too big to fit inside the stencil.  In the end, I ended up free handing the print and it turned out better than I thought it would.

I decided to cover the base with black fondant and placed the bottom tier on top of it.  I planned on covering the circumference of the base with some zebra print ribbon I had found.

After completing the bottom tier, I turned my attention to the bow.  Now I had attempted making a bow before on a couple of cakes but this bow was going to be different.  The bow was to be sort of a neon green color.  I used only gum paste from the bow since it dries faster.  To make the bow I cut four strips of gum paste in the shape of a rectangle.  The dimensions of the strips were 2 1/2 inches by 6 inches.  I used to of the strips to make the loops.  To hold their shape, I rolled some napkins in the shape of a tube and placed them inside the loops.

To make the "legs" of the bow, I took the remaining to strips and cut triangles out of the bottoms and placed strips inside of a plastic bag to prevent them from drying out.

After I finished the bow, I turned my attention to the top tier which I covered in hot pink fondant and decorated it with black dots.

The last thing I had to worry about was the "B" that was to be place on a rhombus shaped shield.  I decided to free hand the "B" in white fondant as opposed to using my letter molds.  In the end, this had to be one of my favorite cakes to make.