Hello Kitty Cake

At work, we celebrate birthdays once a month - and for October I got to make the cake! There are some people that absolutely loveeee Hello Kitty, so I thought that would be really fun to make for the October babies.

For the cake part (which I made a day earlier), I used the chocolate cake from Smitten Kitchen and also used a white cake from her website as well.

The White Cake:
3 3/4 cups cake flour
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon plus 2 3/4 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 1/2 sticks (10 ounces) unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 1/4 cups plus 1/3 cup buttermilk
5 whole eggs
2 egg yolks
2 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1. Mix dry.
2. Add butter and 1 1/4 cups buttermilk, and beat until fluffy.
3. Mix in a separate bowl the rest of the ingredients.
4. Fold the wet into the dry in three parts.
5. Bake at 325 for about 26-28 minutes!

Now for the interesting part! Making the Hello Kitty!

I had two layers of each flavor from a 9" x 13" baking pan.

I had made a chocolate frosting and a vanilla frosting - a sweet recipe, because I knew the cake wasn't too sweet.

So I stacked the layers next to each other with a nice layer of frosting:



Drew a tentative template that I would cut out on top of the cake by dragging the pointy end of my paintbrush along the frosting.

Started cutting carefully to get the shape I wanted:



After getting the shape needed for a pretty Kitty, I made some fondant and covered the cat. I cut out the smaller, more distinctive pieces of Kitty and put them on:



Then the last step was to paint everything! I painted on gel dye for the black parts and painted on dust color (painted it on by mixing with vodka - it evaporates) for the yellow, pink, and red. Here's the final result!