Practice Cakes

I made this to bring over to a friend's house for a dinner party.
I think a whole, homemade, decorated cake is a nice hostess gift.

Have I mentioned that I love that studying here involves baking cakes?! Anyway for the midterm we have to make a cake. The type of cake, filling, and covering are randomly assigned as sets. I got genoise, buttercream, and fondant. Problematically, we haven't actually used fondant yet. Apparently it's similar to covering a cake with marzipan, but it does have a slightly different texture and needs to be worked with slightly differently. So I bought some fondant to practice with (it's pretty lousy quality, but I figure it approximates what we'll be using), made some genoise, and practiced soft ball sugar (for the buttercream) for the millionth time--and I still overcooked it on my first go. Overall, a pretty successful cake and buttercream. The fondant wasn't terribly easy to work with. I think I made it a little too thick and then it got all wrinkled looking because I had to wrap and store the cakes overnight and apparently this fondant was quite soft. Ah well, it was still nice and good practice. The flowers were fun to make and I'm really happy that I've managed to figure out how to make calla lilies.

My second practice cake. Sorry the colors came out a bit faded.