Covered Wagon Cake

She came up with the idea of a covered wagon cake for her 10th birthday all on her own.  "A covered wagon?  Like the old west?" She said, "Yes, like the olden days." She pulled out her party notebook with party details designed around the "olden days" covered wagon theme.  Okay.  She didn't want a cake shaped like a covered wagon and she liked the ruffle cake I made in July, so we planned blue ombre fondant ruffle layered cake with a covered wagon on top.

The wagon is made out of gum paste, colored with brown food coloring.  If you don't mix the brown all the way to a smooth color, you'll end up with a nice wood grain. Roll thin and use two round cutters for the wooden wagon wheels.  You'll cut 4 wheels total and stack them as shown below for a more dimension.  Take the inner circles and cut the wooden wheel spokes.  The wooden wagon is one base piece with scored lines and nail holes/texture.  The wagon is trimmed with thin strips of the wood colored gum paste.

 The cover for the wagon is a piece of thinnly rolled gum paste cut to the length of the wagon and at a diagonal to the top.  To give the tarp a frame, I used a tool and pushed the gum paste around the tool to leave an indentation.  While drying, place a pen or marker at the top of the fold, again to keep the dimension.  You could look through one end of the cover to the other.

After baking the 3 layers, crumb coating the cake and adding the ruffled fondant layers (you can follow the tutorial from the previous ruffle cake here), place the gum paste covered wagon.  For ombre ruffles working dark to light, color 1/3 of the fondant blue and then every layer or two (depending on cake size), add more white fondant to the blue.  By the final layer (at the bottom of the cake), the fondant will be a pale, pale blue.

 The base of the cake was finished off with these Sixlets Shimmer Candy Pearls:

 The shimmer pearls make the cake a little more girly.

A few gum paste rocks finish off the details for the covered wagon cake.  She loved her cake.  Even though the cake was the centerpiece of the party, it was the last baked item on the list- finishing around midnight the night before the party.  I told her if we'd stayed up 30 more minutes, it would have been her actual birth time.  More party details coming!