Black & White and Red all over

Back at it tonight! Happy St. Patricks day- hope you are enjoying the beautiful day. The weather was insane today- beautiful, beautiful. My day was a little chaotic, and there was nothing more I wanted to do at day end then to see Moochie and #1 and to decorate.... and then watch Modern Family!

So, this is the 'girly 10 year old, red and black' birthday cake I made today. Per usual M.O. for these cakes, I was given very little direction besides the following:
1) Girly
2) Red & Black
3) It's a 10 year old birthday cake
4) She likes iCarly and H.S.M.
5) Loves chocolate cake
6) big enough to feed 10 people

ok.... Um, the options were endless and as this was my FIRST paid for cake I wanted to make sure it looked as professional as possible, while trying something I hadn't done before. First things first- the cake is an 8 in round. 3 layers. 2 layers are chocolate banana and one is banana. The filling is a chocolate peanut butter ganache (IT IS SO YUM! It tastes like a reese's pieces bag of candy melted and fluffed up.. if that makes any sense), and I used red fondant that I bought at the cake store and black marshmallow fondant I made from scratch.



I made the stars on Saturday night in order to let them set up to stand on the cake. The 'diamonds' I rolled out and cut today. I was so lucky that the diamonds (squares) fit on the cake w/o too much overlap and this was without measuring! stupid on my part. But... It worked.



The bottom is obviously a ribbon. I wanted to see how ribbon attached to buttercream because I have seen SO many cakes with that ribbon border. It was easy-peasy and I thought added a little extra girly to the cake.



I piped in the dots at the corners of the diamonds to clean it up a bit. I could have used some dragee's but I didn't have plain white ones, and I had a ton of buttercream.



Then I tooth-picked in the monogram M. I also made this on Saturday using my new extruder. I seriously DON"T know how to make the fondant come out perfectly smooth from the extruder. It has these little ridges that you can't really see in the picture (on purpose!) but it BUGGED me. However, the M set up well, it dried enough to hold it's own, but I tooth-picked in for some added support.

Not sure if it's girlie enough. But I didn't want to do flowers or hearts... I thought way too predictable and so close to Valentines day- I didn't want it to be confused as a Valentines cake.

Well, Cheers! now to watch some Modern Family. Goodnight!