Toy Story (Andy's Room) Birthday Cake

One of my son's ABA therapists was complaining the other day about not being able to find a cute cake for her two-year-old son's Toy Story birthday party. She had some Toy Story figurines, but didn't know what to do with them. I quickly chimed in that I would love to design and make a cake for her....and voila! I give you Andy's bed! I had so much fun making this cake and learned A LOT about fondant and royal icing.

I need to write a bunch of notes to myself about this cake because chances are, next year when Toy Story 3 comes out, either one of my boys or a friend's child will possibly want something similar.....so I need to remind myself here before I forget some of the details.

The cake itself is two 9x13 inch white cake mixes, crumb coated and draped with white fondant. I attempted to do a bed corner fold in the corners so it looked like a sheet. Work fast with fondant, it dries quickly. I put dowels in the bottom "box spring" cake layer for extra support. Fondant is a lot heavier than regular icing, so you need the dowels.

The base is two pieces of cardboard covered in contact paper that I picked up at Home Depot (that stuff you use to line kitchen shelves). It looks just like a wood floor, no?

Next, I tinted some fondant for the quilt, rolled it out (use plenty of powdered sugar so it doesn't stick to the counter) and indented the quilt pattern with a toothpick lightly pushed into the surface on the horizontal. I'm sure there's some fancy fondant tool that would work better. I just didn't get to the store to look around. I placed the quilt on, added a sheet border to the top, and made my pillow out of two graham crackers (cut to size) and wrapped in fondant again. I pinched the corners to make it look "pillow-y".

While mixing up a batch of royal icing, I tinted some fondant brown and wrapped four pretzel rods and four whoppers. I used a small paint brush dipped in water to get the fondant to stick to the pretzels, grahams, and candy. I "glued" them on to the bed with royal icing using a piping bag. Next time I will definitely tint the royal icing to match whatever I am gluing so you can't see it as much. The headboard was one graham cracker wrapped in fondant.

Finally, I tinted some more fondant and cut out letters using my awesome alphabet cookie cutters (I use them all the time for different things). The number "2" was made by cutting out a letter "S", turning it over, and then reshaping it a bit.

The day of the party, we "glued" on the figurines and added the candles. Wiggle them into the fondant so it doesn't crack. One Andy's Room Cake ready to go! Hope you have a great birthday Danton, enjoy!