Making this cake wasn't as difficult or time consuming as it looks because all of the Simpson figures are plastic toys. I love it when cakes are easy.... although I did make the sofa, tv, and the donuts out of fondant.
Here are the plastic figures - aren't they cute!
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To make the sofa, tv, and donuts I use my super cool Creality Ender 3 V2 3D printer to make cutter sets for each object. My 3D printer is my favorite cake decorating tool. If you want to read more about it, click HERE.
For the donuts, I uploaded the shapes below to the CookieCad design tool which in turn generated an STL file. The STL file is then sent to a "slicer" program which generates a .GCODE file specific to your 3D printer. Finally the .GCODE file is sent to the 3D printer and the cookies cutters printers. Easy right??? FYI: I used 3.25" donuts for this cake.
For the donut I started by tinting white Wilton fondant with a little bit of Ivory gel food color to give a light tan color. The "icing" of the donut was made with pink fondant. I mixed white and pink fondant together to get a paler shade of pink. First I used my donut frosting cutter to cut the pink frosting and then used the "mouth/teeth" cutter to cut the "bite" out of just the pink frosting layer. Then I positioned the pink frosting on top of the tan donut.
Next I matched up the mouth cutter with the cutout in the pink frosting, and then cut through the tan part of the donut. I tried cutting the pink frosting and tan donut together, but the pink got smeared into the tan of the donut which didn't look very good.
The sprinkles on top of the donut are just pieces of thinly rolled fondant.
I made the TV from another cookie cutter set, but you could just cut the pieces from a paper temple. I just get a kick out of making the cutters. Below is the template I used to make my TV 4-1/2" wide.
I used purple and black fondant mixed with Tylose power (which makes the fondant harden) to make the body of the TV. For the TV screen I rolled out white gum paste and glued a printed "Happy Birthday Madison" image to the gum paste using a glue dot runner. After the image was glued to the gum paste, I used the TV screen cutter to cut out the gum paste, and then I placed the TV screen on the main body of the TV. And just to give the TV some pizzazz, I added some finishing touches to the knobs and the speaker. I also dusted the speaker with some brown food power to give it some depth. For the TV antenna, I used some thin wire, but I should have used something thicker because the wire didn't show up very well.
For the sofa I used Wilton Brown fondant mixed with Tylose. I again made a set of cutters, but you could just use a paper template. I made the sofa about 5-1/2" long, but it was actually a little small when compared to the size of the toys, but the top tier of my cake was only 6" so I couldn't make the sofa any larger. I made a cutter for the back of the sofa, the base of the sofa, a cutter for the arm rest, and a cutter to make the three cushions sitting on the base of the sofa.
Sorry I didn't take a better picture of the sofa. Once each sofa piece was cut, it glued them together with a dab of water.To tint the buttercream for the base tier, I use Electric Green and a touch of Leaf Green to tone the bright color down a bit. For the top tier I used Electric Blue and a touch of Navy Blue. The border abound the base of the cakes was made using a Wilton pie crust pearl mold.
Once the cakes were stacked and the border attached, it was just a matter of placing the plastic figures on the cake. There is a bit of fondant under the figures to keep them from touching the buttercream and to help them stay in place.
So here is the finished cake. Don't you just love The Simpsons!
