Pancake stack cake

Yesterday was the school carnival. Ben likes to take an entry to donate to the cake walk, which means we have to decide on a design that he can largely make on his own.  I bake the cake and frost it but then become his assistant.

In the past we've made a giant cheeseburger and fries, nachos, and a pizza. This year's cake was a stack of pancakes...really, really simple design but ohmygod it took forever to make.  

We started with something I've never tried before: a plastic ballon straw placed in the center of the cake plate for a center support.  More about that later.  

I put two six inch cakes over the center support and Ben started adding the "pancakes". These were just strips of white fondant that he rolled into snake shapes, then flattened and painted with food coloring.  

We added those fondant strips one at a time around the cake, building up the stack a little bit at a time.  

After adding about a dozen of the strips I started to wish we had made the cake much, much shorter. Getting to the top took almost an hour.

The final pancake is just one large circle of fondant added to the top.

Back to the center support.  We put several floral wires into the plastic straw for support and covered it with melted caramel (insert more food coloring here). Then we bent the support at an angle and put an empty syrup bottle on it.  I did end up helping a lot with this part because we had to cut the wires and bend the support a couple of times to get the angle right.

The final touches were colored piping gel "syrup" and starburst "butter". 

It doesn't matter how early we start the cake for the carnival or how much we plan for it; we are always running at the end.  So the only picture I got of the finished cake was taken in the school gym.

Ben was ecstatic about how the cake turned out and was SO PROUD to show his friends. Between that and the fact that I got to spend all that time hanging out with him, I'm feeing pretty fortunate.