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This is the first cake that I have decorated(but definitely not my last!), even though I had been wanting to make one for a very long time. I have only really done cupcakes in the past, not ever really having a good enough occasion for a cake. So when my sister showed me this contest it seemed like it would be fun to take a week from my leisurely summer to make one. But my long week was quickly cut down to about 29 hours when I found out that entries were due the next day. So I started right away (well, first I phoned my sister and we freaked out for a while, but relatively right away).
After choosing the design and planning out all of the decorations, I settled down to find a good recipe for a pound cake, as it is dense and will hold together well through the cutting process. After quite a bit of looking, I chose a good lemon pound cake recipe from Canadian Living. I then ran around the city looking for a store that would have liquid gel food colouring and be open on a civic holiday. I also found the paper liners for my mini cupcake pan that I had been looking for everywhere, only to find that they did not fit into the pan. They were some other weird size.
Instead of using the traditional fondant, I made the raindrops and the orange of the sun out of something called "chocolate plastic" which I got from the book Little Cakes-from the Whimsical Bakehouse. It melts a bit, but works the same, and tastes a whole lot better.
It took me a lot longer than I care to mention to make all of the little raindrops, and getting the colour for them was just as hard, but ultimately it was really fun to make and delicious to eat.