Another birthday cake for a coworker. I did a lot of them during this period of a year or two. And actually I did three versions of this cake - another one for a friend of mine, and the third was for a bake sale raffle at work.
Anyway - basically with this one I was still learning how to play with fondant and food coloring, and also how to make decorations with royal icing.
So for this cake, I colored some lumps of fondant ("lumps" - yeah, all these technical terms...) in different colors - autumn leaf colors, basically. green, yellow, orange and red. And then I smushed them together into one lump and rolled them out into one big patchwork piece of colors.
Looking at it now, it strikes me as kind of garish. I'd do something different. But it was fun.
Anyway, so that was the background for the other stuff - the royal icing leaves. I had bought a little set of cookie cutters that included 4 or 5 different leaf shapes and a pumpkin. I traced the leaf shapes to use as templates. Then I placed the templates under parchment paper (which is translucent) and piped the outline of the leaves with royal icing directly onto the parchment. (Royal icing won't stick to parchment when it dries.) And then, I filled the leaves with thinned royal icing in a different color. (I was using the same colors I'd used for the fondant, with the addition of brown. I also cut out leaves from the scraps of fondant.
When the royal icing leaves were dry, I glued them all over the cake with dots of royal icing. (Royal icing is so handy!) And I surrounded the cake with the fondant leaves, probably to hide my less-than-perfect trimming of the fondant that covered the cake.
And this is what it looked like:
Oh, yeah, and inside, the cake consisted of two layers of lemon cake alternating with two layers of yellow & chocolate marble cake. The frosting between the layers was chocolate.
