Snowman Christmas Party Cake

Hi everyone! This will just be a short post today since I need to get packed up for a quick trip to Ohio for work, which will also include a visit home. I meant to show y'all this cake sometime last week, but just never got around to it. Instead my evenings were spent doing Christmas things around the house, including a few crafts that I'll show on here soon. Back to the cake though. My office Christmas party was last Saturday, and a few weeks prior to that, our office administrator had asked me if I'd be interested in making dessert for it. She was offering to pay me for it, so of course I said yes :) She said I could do whatever design/flavors I wanted and it just needed to feed around 100 people. The design I came up with was "safety snowman". As a pipeline company that is involved in lots of construction around heavy equipment and high pressure pipelines, we are always very concerned with safety, and one of the prime symbols of safety is the hard hat. Traditionally, hard hats are white, but since the snowman was going to be white, I decided to make it in the color of our logo which is red, and then do the company logo in white and red on the front.

A little blurry, but that's probably for the best :) He needs arms!!!

I don't really have any process shots of making this cake, and the final pictures aren't so great either, but I'll give a quick description of how it was made. The cakes for the snowman were all baked in a set of pyrex bowls that I have in 3 sizes. The base cake was mint chocolate cake, filling and ganache, the middle was almond cake with amaretto filling and white chocolate ganache, and the top was plain chocolate cake, filling and ganache. All the cakes were covered in marshmallow fondant, which as you can see, I once again had a hard time getting the cakes covered without wrinkles. But snowmen are usually a little lumpy, right? The hard hat was actually a giant rice crispie treat that I made and shaped using a real hard hat. Then it was iced and covered in fondant as well.

Just waiting on his nose. The little yellow and purple things in the bottom right are the "bubble straws" I used for support. 

To support the cake, Joe cut a piece of MDF into a square then drilled into it a little bit and glued in a dowel rod. I covered the base in wrapping paper, and poked a whole the same size as the dowel into the cardboard round that was under each cake section. I also used big "bubble straws" as the supports inside each cake. This set up/support system seemed to work really well.

The support only needed to go a little way into the hard hat. 

As usual, I wasn't completely pleased with the cake, since he was a little wrinkly and lumpy, but the real thing I was kicking myself for was forgetting to bring arms for him! I was just going to grab some real sticks from the yard, then place straws in the side of the cake and slide the sticks in there so they wouldn't touch the actual cake. But I was so busy working on the cake all day that it completely slipped my mind. He just looks kind of silly without arms. In the end though, the cake was a big hit and it tasted delicious, so I'll consider it a success!

Stay tuned for a Christmas craft in a couple days and a giveaway to go along with it! I hope you're all doing well and having a merry Christmas season.