A Wizardry Birthday

It is Lilly's 6th Birthday with a challenging theme of the Wizards of Waverly Place...

After a few cake consultations I felt I had a sense of what she wanted. The main goal was to make an edible magic wand so in Lilly's words "she can eat it and share it with Lindsey and Avah"... Too precious... I was going to make an open book of spells but I couldn't find my cake pan so I ended up making a sheet cake, cut it in half and stacked it to make it look like a thick book of spells. The cake was inspired by sonia57's version from cake central.

I'm most proud of the Wizard's logo. I hand painted it using food coloring on a fondant plaque I imprinted with bricks. I learned some lesson's along the way like I normally do... but had a fun time making this cake...

Lesson learned number one... I should have put a little more icing on the top layer and made it smooth so the fondant piece that lays on top would be smooth... Here is the cake waiting the top of the book. I should have also cut the pieces of fondant I tucked in to the sides of the bottom of the cake a little wider so they would show through after the extra icing was added... They disappear in some spots.

This is the back side of the fondant piece for the top of the cake. I covered the star cut outs with a thin piece of purple fondant and used a icing tip to make the holes for the book binding...

Just need to add some extra on top of the crumb coat so I can make book page impressions on the side of the cake.

Lesson number two- Don't break the most important element of the cake... I tried to fix it but it broke apart even more... So I re-made it. I put a piece of wire through the center of the new wand so hopefully it will give it enough strength to survive transport...

The finished logo. I free hand painted it used the food coloring powders on the left side of this picture as my paints. I mixed with a little vodka to make them liquid... I didn't drink any- I swear...

This is what the real one looks like... Not bad, right?

I covered the top of the cake with a layer of luster dust mixed with vodka again but you can't really see it in this picture. It gives the cake a little bit of a sheen in the right light.

All of the pieces just waiting for assembly. I'm going to put it together at my Sister's house so I don't have any issues...

I found this picture on the Disney website. I cut around the image to isolate the girl then added a text box for Happy Birthday. I traditionally HATE writing on cakes so I'm trying to come up with creative ways to not write on the cake...