Patriotic 4th of July Cake

I hope you all had a great weekend!  If your weather was anything like our here in Kansas City, then you spent your weekend just trying to keep cool during the triple digit heat!  We made the most of the hot days by test driving some cars on Saturday morning, then I went out and explored the old downtown area of Overland Park, Kansas.  I had heard about a cool little shop there so I decided to go and ended up finding a bunch of other fun shops and restaurants.  Turns out they also have a big farmer's market there too!  I'll definitely have to go back and bring Joe with me, but maybe we'll wait til this fall.  On Saturday night we hung out with some friends and played games.  Before heading to our friends' house I baked the layers for this cake:

I decided last week to make a 4th of July themed cake that Joe could to bring to work for free advertising for my little cake business.  I knew I wanted a 2-tiered cake that used both piped icing and fondant and of course it had to be red, white, and blue.  I'd seen a really awesome "Patriotic Rose" cake on a blog called I am baker, so that became the design for the bottom tier.  For the top tier I decided to do simple smooth frosting with big fondant stars.  I would have done smaller stars, but I only had on size cookie cutter :)  The roses on the bottom tier were unbelievably simple to do!  If you want to see the video tutorial just click on that "I am baker" link above.  The best part of the roses is that you don't have to do a crumb coat of icing.  Just pipe the roses straight onto the side of the cakes.  I will definitely be using that technique again, possibly very soon.  The cake seemed to be a big hit at Garmin and Joe said that it was gone by about 9:30 this morning.  He said no one wanted to make the first cut though, so he had to go cut the first piece haha!  Here are some process and final pictures of the cake!

The bottom tier (8").  Like I said before, I didn't have to do a full crumb coat, just had to fill in the gaps between layers.

The first row of roses.  The key to making the roses is kind of overlapping them so you don't have to go back and fill in spaces.  

The 2nd row of roses overlapping the blue ones.

All done!  I did one round of roses on top of the cake, but then just filled in the middle since it was going to get covered anyway.  I had a friend say that the roses make it look like a parade float.  I kind of agree!

The top tier (6").  I did a very light crumb coat in blue icing because I was afraid I wouldn't have enough white.  

The red star kind of looks like a floppy starfish.   

Almost done, just have to hide the seam between tiers with fondant balls.

The Stars & Stripes!

This might be my favorite cake so far!  Oh, and I've had lots of people ask me about making the marshmallow fondant, so I took some pictures of it when I made it for this cake, so I'll be doing a post about making that pretty soon.  I'm also getting excited to travel to Louisiana this coming weekend for my friend Sarah's wedding!  This week will fly by and I can't wait!  Have a great week everybody!  Sorry for all the exclamation points!!!! hehe