...and she lived happily ever after.

Even though I have taken a short  hiatus from caking I still have a few projects on the calendar that were booked before my decision to slow down.

I'm not going to have much of a break from cakes, I just won't be operating at such a hectic pace for the next year.

This cake is for a woman who works in publishing and was to be the surprise for her 30th birthday. 

Her mother is the one who came up with the idea and the design. I just had to figure out how to make it happen.

She wanted an open book with the words "...and she lived happily ever after." to be the message. 

Perfect timing , Jessica of Jessicakes recently made an open book cake and posted a tutorial on her blog.

I used her tutorial to make this cake.

I started by covering the cake board to look like a wooden plank table.

I cut strips of white fondant, laid them on the cake board and rolled them with a wood grain impression roller.

After I had the strips imprinted I diluted some brown food coloring gel with Vodka and painted the cake board. ( The board can be seen in my final photo. )

This was my first time using foam core. I found some at Michael's Crafts and used an Exacto knife to cut it.

My Roget's Thesaurus was my model. I cut 2 pieces of foam core to be the covers and then 3  strips the width of the binding for the binding of my cake base. I also made 4 support strips.

With a hot glue gun I secured the 3 pieces of binding together and then I attached the supports to the binding with some more glue.
Once that was done, I glued the covers to the spine exactly as Jessica instructed.

Please check out her tutorial for more details, she gives very detailed instructions on how to construct this platform.

Using my opened Thesaurus I traced the stacked pages onto more of the foam core to make templates for each of the book halves.
I placed these on top of the cake first to line them up and make sure I didn't cut an uneven page.

Then I slid them down the sides and carved and contoured my cake.

Once I was satisfied with my carving I placed each " stack of pages" on the foam core structure.

This cake was requested in buttercream, that was my challenge as the design really does look best with fondant. Not only does mine have to be buttercream...it has to be chocolate buttercream.

I did get the OK to make the page overlay in fondant. I printed edible images for the pages using this page template.

I saved it in my photos and then used Picmonkey ( a great free photo editor ) to lighten it up a bit and add my text.

I printed these on edible icing sheets and attached them to a sheet of fondant .
Lay the pages on top of the cake.

I added a yellow fondant bookmark to cover the seams where the pages meet and a flower to make it more feminine.

...and she lived happily ever after!