Next I made the two teddy bears. Since I couldn't really marble the bears I made one Yellow and the other Chocolate Fudge. I had forgotten to take pictures of them until they were half frosted. JR called about that time and insisted that I take pictures of the process because he likes to see them. Here are the bears with just black icing.
The bears weren't complicated or difficult, but they took a lot longer than I expected. My original plan was to have at least one of them holding a baby blanket. I would post a picture of the cake that gave me the idea, but Blogger won't let me. It's called "Off to Dreamland" on the Wilton website. But when I realized how long it took to frost them, I decided it wasn't worth it to try to figure out the blanket. I didn't want to get to the shower with an unfinished cake because I started a project that was too big. If I had done it before and knew what I was doing, maybe, but I would have been figuring it out as I went and didn't want to give Melanie an ugly cake. A simple-looking cake I could handle.
I did try something else that was new, though. I tried to paint the fondant. I made little balls of fondant and marked lines on them with a toothpick. I then used a brush and food coloring to paint them just like I had read about online. Unfortunately, I did not do enough research first. The food coloring doesn't dry on its own. You have to mix it with alcohol and then let it evaporate out. It takes all the moisture with it so it looks like you've painted with water colors. I went to the Shoppette to buy a small (i.e., hotel fridge sized) bottle of vodka because I know vodka dries odorless. I don't know about other alcohols so I wanted vodka. What I learned was that they don't sell little bottles of alcohol here. They only sell big ones. I didn't want a huge bottle of alcohol in my house so I just decided to do something else. I kneaded the balls until the colors blended together. Here's what they looked like while I was painting them.
For the border around the bottom I made some of the letter blocks, but again, because of the paint drying problem, I didn't put letters on all of them. I also made two larger blocks to go on the top of the cake. Melanie and Victor, at that point, still hadn't decided on names for the boys. The doctors call them "Baby A" and "Baby B" so those were the letters I put on the big blocks. While I was at the BX (base exchange) I saw a picture frame that said, "Twins are love times two." I thought it was cute so I wrote that on the little blocks around the bottom. Between the blocks I piped some buttercream frosting.Here's the finished cake:
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