A failed cake and a relaxing morning!

On Friday night we started the cake, Michael had to carve them from pretty much frozen so that took quite a bit of time, there are three layers in each tier of cake so nine cakes in all. I had made one tier vanilla, one chocolate and the top one lemon. Everything seemed to be going well, but all the carving and assembling took till midnight. We had to make supports and each cake had to be carved into to create a flat plane for the cake on top. Not for one minute did I think we would hit such a problem with the fondant as it had worked so beautifully in the past. But when I rolled out the fondant for the bottom cake(which was massive), I had to roll it out quite thinly to get it big enough(mistake nr 1), then I placed the fondant on top of the cake which had very soft and thick buttercream(mistake nr 2, it should've been put in the fridge to set). The combination of too thin fondant on very soft buttercream caused terrible rippling and wrinkling, and once the fondant was on there was nothing we could do to try and fix it. I placed the fondant on the next two cakes and they didn't look much better.


This was the end result. The angle was also leaning too much, it should've been more upright. At that time of night the only solution I could come up with was to try and cover the rippled parts with decorations, or to pull of the fondant completely and try to put on buttercream instead, but Michael and I headed for bed and prayed together that all would end up ok and felt peace after that.
When I woke up the next morning, the kids asked me why we had made a cake like that, I told them things hadn't worked so well, but when I went downstairs I saw what they meant, the top two cakes had toppled over causing damage to the bottom one, now there was no way we could sort this cake out. I suggested we go to a shop that sold cakes and just buy three simple cakes that we could stack and then use our decorations to put on, the children were so upset that we were going to buy shop made cakes, they so much wanted a lovely homemade birthday cake. Well the shop cakes were nothing short of terrible, so back we came. I phoned to explain what had happened to the cake and to my surprise was told the cake was in fact due the next day, that gave us a whole day and night to come up with another solution, what a wonderful answer to prayer. It was a lovely sunny day, so we first decided to go to Bushy Park for a nice relaxing walk and to let our toadies go.
Ayla loved watching the ducks.

Some of the toads still had their tail.
So cute.

And tiny.
Eden got to pet this very tame deer, she was so happy to get this close.
And then the others found a deer who was willing to eat from their hands.
Matching big and little sister.
This is the first time we got to see the males sparring.