Project Cake (part 2)

So the Christmas (practice wedding, but don't tell T) cake is ready. The things that worked well:
- Fruit cakes are easy to bake.
- They are also surprisingly easy to stack. You just put them on boards, push dowelling through the cake and balace them on top. Simple.
- Ribbon looks nice tied round a white cake.
- I actually made a couple of 'individual size' cakes as well and these look really really good. Maybe I could do a bunch of stacked mini cakes on a cake stand with bigger ones on top. Could be an easier way of doing it....

Things that didn't go so well:
- Both marzipan and fondant icing are not easy to make from scratch. This actually isn't so important, and the wedding will be in England, so I can buy it easily.
- It's really hard to get a totally flat and even top to the cake. I'm not sure how they manage it. Maybe it would be help if I cut the top off the cake before icing it. Mine is kind of bumpy and this makes it look really amateur. In fact, this is the one things that would make a huge difference.
- Paper roses do not look classy. I don't know why I thought they would when I made them out of coffee filters (!) These have now been abandoned.

So all in all I'm quite pleased with myself. I can make a pretty looking cake, and a total cost of less than £50. Yay!

Updated with photos:

So here's the big one... a 9 inch and an 8 inch cake with a very bumpy top (but we now know how to fix that thanks Eliandme!) and a Christmas star on the top to keep up the pretence to T that I am not obsessing about the wedding with 18 months still to go...

And these are the small ones I might actually stack into a cool pile of mini cakes....

Ta da!