Here is the cake I made for my good friends Michael and Elizabeth’s wedding. They asked me to make the groom’s cake for their wedding on August 21, 2010. I was a bit trepidations because I had never made a cake for such a formal occasion, but only for fun where it didn’t matter if it turned out badly.
Elizabeth told me to “be creative” and I really stressed out about what to make. Scott finally suggested this idea using D&D miniatures to decorate.
I decided to use fondant for the coake to make the cake extra smooth. I first colored the white fondant tan to make it the color of a gaming mat. I wrinkled the side of the cake to give texture to what would later become cliffs. I then took a pizza cutter and a ruler and made an 1" x 1" grid on the cake to represent a gaming mat.
I painted cliffs on the side using gel food coloring mixed with Vodka. (According to the internet, vodka is the best thing to mix with the food coloring because it evaporates to quickly and doesn't leave a taste behind) I based the cliffs on the cliffs from the Visconti Hours. I took royal icing dyed green to make the vines. There are also four wooden dowels stuck into the bottom cake to support the weight of the upper tier. The cake is actually much bigger than it looks. It is made from four boxes of cake mix and fed over forty people.
I took more food coloring and vodka and painted on a fire spell and acid breath for the fight my figures were about to get into.
Here is the finished product. I made two ladders out of royal icing and a bunch of fondant rocks which I painted with brown food coloring to make them more textured looking. I also added some graham cracker crumbs to look like loose dirt around the bottom of the cake.
