Billy The Snowman

We built Billy The Snowman for our good friend's birthday. Bill loves the beach, and his birthday is right at the beginning of winter, so my husband came up with this design (and set out to do it during the craziest Christmas week ever. But I digress).

Billy is obviously a 3D cake. He is sitting on a styrofoam half round, with actual cake for the top half of the bottom round. His head is all cake, and his hat is a 4" cake sitting on a cardboard round. The icing on the hat and ground is pecan...german chocolate is Bill's favorite. Which is fortunate...it worked for our design!

Let's go from the bottom up. The cake needed a structure. It was going to travel from Placerville to Sacramento, with my husband driving. Yikes. The bottom board is a masonite square. You need this kind of sturdy base for any large/heavy cake. We covered it in fondant, then spread pecan icing and crushed vanilla wafers for the sand. The snowman's form is built on metal piping (washed very well and then wrapped, of course). We used a styrofoam base just because we are not cake experts and the cake was traveling. On top of that is cake baked in Wilton's Doll Mold. For the arms, we used rice crispie treats to mold around the pipes. The head is baked in Wilton's Sports Ball pan. The hat is a 4 inch on a cardboard round. The connectors on the piping acted as dowels, keeping the weight of the next layer off the previous layer. Hopefully you can see what I mean in the pictures. Anyway...he is coated in a thin layer of buttercream, then fondant. I had some issues with the fondant (probably b.c it was 2am), so to cover my mistakes I added a thin texturing layer of buttercream over it...and liked the effect ALOT! He is then sprayed with silver luster dust.

The palm tree is all Dennis. The pole screws into the masonite board. He fashioned a cardboard cone to slip over that, and he layered fondant/gumpaste up the cardboard. We used alot of fondant/gumpaste mix for this stuff b.c it dries faster and sets up harder than plain fondant. The leaves he created a template and cut the leaves using straight gumpaste. We fashioned coconuts from chocolate dipped crispies, then attached them to the leaves, then to the trunk.

His glass is just plastic, real sunglasses, and we ran out of time on the surfboard :) It is just painted cardboard. I'd do gumpaste next time. Oh, and his nose is fondant, on a skewer, stuck in. I assembled the nose and leaves at the venue.

Whew! I know I forgot some things...if you have questions, just ask!