Harvest Pumpkin

This one was for a classroom celebration. We were able to recycle some leftover red fondant we had saved from previous work, just by adding yellow (that is, a lot of yellow). There are four layers of cake, but just one circle of cardboard in the middle; it's not really tall enough to warrant multiple levels of scaffolding. Usually, we level the cakes after they cool by cutting the rounded tops off with our electric carving knife (which we use for sculpting, too), but this time we left the top and bottom layers alone and just turned the bottom one upside down. That gave us a bit of a headstart towards the rounded look. The stem is actually a piece of cake that got cut off as we shaped the pumpkin (use everything!) that we covered in fondant and literally just set on top. We notched the ridges before adding icing or dowels, but in retrospect I should have waited because the layers lost a lot of structural integrity before I ever started handling them.

The kids liked it, but kept asking me how we made the "skin."