The lips just didn't look right so I made some modification and did some digital experimenting. I tried big lips, small lip and no lips at all, but I couldn't decide which version to use.
Here are the different version:
No Lips:
Little Lips
Big Lips
In the end I went with the Big Lips, but I wasn't completely happy. So which do you think looks best?
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Construction of this cake was pretty easy, and only took about 4 hours from start to finish (which is really, really fast for me). I filled, trimmed, and crumb coated the cake. I added some lumps of Mona Lisa fondant to represent the bulging cheeks, and covered the whole cake with bright yellow colored fondant. In the picture below you can see the paper printout I used as a template. I printed the image to match the size of my cake, and then cut out the eyes, tongue, and mouth so I could get the size and placement correct.
First I made the eyes. I cut up the individual components from the printed image and trimmed the fondant to match those shapes. I made the yellow pieces a littler bigger so they would wrap around the top and sides of white part.
Then I placed the completed eyes on the cake. I added string of black fondant between the eye balls and the lids.
Next I worked on the mouth, lips and tongue. I used a thin roll of brown fondant to form the mouth, and some red to form the tongue. I don't like coloring black or red fondant (too messy) so I keep some red and black Fondarific on hand. The Fonarific has a long shelf life and it stays supersoft forever so I always use it for accent pieces.
So at this point I started to deviate from the drunk emoji image I was using. I wanted the cake to look more girly so I added some pink lips. Humm...
Brown went above the eyes to form eyebrows.
At this point the emoji head was almost finished, but sadly I didn't like it. It just didn't look girly enough. I added a pink bow hoping that would fix the problem, but I still wasn't happy. It was getting late so I went ahead and formed the emoji "hand" clutching a little bottle of wine, and added the "Happy Birthday" text at the bottom of the board using the upper and lower Funky Alphabet cutters. I also added some hollow circles and asterisks to the board. These are supposed to represent hiccups and burps. Drunk Emoji remember :-)
Here it is all finished, but to me it just looked off. I wanted to cry.
I made bigger lips and swapped them for the small lips, but I still wasn't happy.
I took off the lips to see how that looked, and while the "lipless" version looked fine - it just didn't look like a girl. Sigh - cake making is hard.
I took a photograph of the Big Lips version and played around with it in Photoshop Elements. (I didn't want to fiddle with the real cake too much and risk damaging it.) In Photoshop I removed the brown smile line on the left side of the face, but that didn't look good.
I moved the big lips and centered them under the eyes, but that didn't look good either (didn't look drunk enough).
In the end I just went with the Big Lip version.
And after all my angst, Laura loved the cake. But I have to admit she was a little drunk by the time she saw the cake. 30th birthdays will do that to a girl.
Happy Decorating Folks,
Carol
Supply List:
Mona Lisa White Fondant
Red Fondarific
Black Fondarific
14" Cake Drum
Wilton Gum-Tex Tylose Powder
Alligator Impression Mat (used on the fondant covering the cake drums)
Funky Upper Case Letter Cutters
Funky Lower Cake Letter Cutters
