"Ugly Little Spud"

My son wanted Slimer for his birthday cake this year. I've always been a Ghostbusters fan, and my son became a huge fan after watching the movies and then getting the video game (which is awesome on the PS3 by the way). I found a few pictures of slimer to work from. This one is a fairly close rendition of the picture I liked the best. The problem is that slimer is a ghost, so you can see through him. Try and turn that into an opaque cake made of icing. I'll admit that I struggled with planning this one. Until I started carving the cake, the design wasn't exactly set. I looked at the picture and started shaving. the folds of his belly are carved into the cake. His eyes and mouth are also carved in. Most of the other detail was made from building up the icing underneath the fondant to give it a little rise and texture. The cake was chocolate and below the marshmallow fondant is chocolate butter cream icing, my favorite. When I use fondant, I put a healthy layer of icing underneath so you can still enjoy the icing even if you hate the fondant.
After shaping the cake, icing it, and putting on the fondant, I pressed the fondant into the detailed areas for shape and accent. It was sort of like playing with a clay sculpture. The only thing was that if you push a little too much, you'll tear the fondant, and it's a very bad day. Luck was with me and I didn't do that. Once I had the fondant exactly how I wanted it, I rubbed the areas where I wanted darker shading with dark green pearl dust. The higher areas where I wanted highlights, I rubbed with white pearl dust. The green made it darker, and the white made it slightly lighter, but both make it shiny. The shine doesn't show as much in the picture, but it was a cool effect. Last, I piped the details on the face and around the base of the cake. Since the icing beneath was chocolate, it wouldn't do to have any chocolate peek out from beneath the green fondant layer. I was incredibly pleased with how this one turned out. It tasted great too. In fact, there was a boy at my son's party which doesn't like chocolate cake. We gave him a piece and he ended up scraping his plate clean. I call that a job well done. I usually have quite a bit of cake left over from my kids' parties, because I make them a bit bigger than necessary. A larger cake is sometimes easier to decorate for the things I often do. In this case, I was surprised at how much was eaten at the party. There was about 1/3 of the cake left for me to take up to the office the next day.