Jesse's Graduation Cake.

I had the opportunity this weekend to make a cake for my cousin's high school graduation party. He is starting NC State in the fall so I thought a nice wolfpack (red and white) color scheme would be appropriate. The cake was vanilla pound cake for the bottom layer and a dense chocolate cake for the top layer. I iced the cake with buttercream and then covered it with a home-made marshmallow fondant. The stripes and polka dots were made from Wilton's colored fondant.

The marshmallow fondant was really good and very simple to make. It was a little more difficult than the store-bought stuff to work with but looked great and tasted SO MUCH better.
I got the marshmallow fondant recipe here.

My favorite parts of the cake were the 'graduation hat strawberries'. The idea came to me one day and I immediately tried out a few to see if the idea would work. They were so cute that I planned the cake around them.

They're really simple to make - all you need are strawberries (with the tips cut off so that they will stand flat on the chocolate bar), a regular hershey's bar (broken into squares-you can make 4 out of one bar), and some semisweet chocolate to melt. After you rinse and dry the strawberries and snip the tips off, dip the strawberries in chocolate and immediately place on the chocolate squares (hershey side up) to dry.

The cake was a huge hit and my cousin loved it.