The TeePee Cake

I figured since I talked about it so much, I better share it.

The cake was baked as part of my son’s annual Blue & Gold dinner for Cub Scouts. Each year a different theme is chosen for the cake decorations. We’ve done sports & games (a 3-d chess piece), space (a 3-d Vader’s Tie Fighter & Death Star), animal kingdom (a 3-d Mayan pyramid with animals & trees stuck on it), and patriotism (the Washington monument with fireworks, 2-d thanks!) in the past.

So this being our last year, I said, “OK, we can try 3-d again.” And I convinced him that we wanted to do a teepee. I don’t know if I’ll work with fondant again, but it was definitely a learning experience.

The cake base is a tube cake and a 8″ layer with a layer of 3 texas-sized cupcakes and a single one on top of that. Then I took a couple bamboo skewers to use as the poles and cut a hole in the fondant. The first attempt resulted in much torn fondant. The second with a hole in the center and a slit out to the edge still wanted to tear as gravity pulled it against the skewers. Hence, the second apron at the top reinforced by the three holes cut into the center.

I would have liked a bit more decoration on the teepee itself, but Dh usually does the fine artistic details on top of my structural base, but he had a horrible headache yesterday and we ended up leaving it more “functional than decorative”. The firepit is made from white M&Ms and the fire itself is pretzel sticks, Cherry & Orange Wildfire Fruit roll-ups and a few red M&Ms for coals. The log beside it is a tootsie roll. The grass is just green decorator sugar and the scuffed dirt is chocolate cake mix.

The cake was part of the live auction last night and I ended up spending $40 to get it back. 🙂  I’d told the kids they could bid up to $25 each on cakes and DD decided she wasn’t bidding this year. It’s all for a good cause and I was happy to finally have a cake in the live auction instead of just on the side for the silent auction. A very sweet ending to the night.