So my friends and I annually overindulge ourselves in the bliss that comes every spring in New Orleans--Crawfish Season. What better accompaniment than an overindulgent, overambitious 7 layered chocolate cake? According to everyone in attendance, none! It was the hit of the party, which made me feel oh so much better about spending 2 weeks of planning and 1 week of production on this bad boy.

Complete with fondant crawfish popping out the pot and completely edible fixins including meringue mushrooms, marzipan potatoes and fondant lemons and even served on a newspaper wrapped board, I spared no expense in making sure all the details were accounted for, even if I did get a bit lazy and never made it around to making the ears of corn on the cob that were in the initial plan.

Here's how it all played out (yes go ahead and call me crazy now for even thinking I had any business trying to pull this off):

Saturday, one week out from the big crawfish pig-out fest, I started making the icings: Marshmallow fondant and peanut butter cream cheese frosting. From then on it was all down hill for my poor little kitchen because we didn't see a clean surface in there for a whole week. Each day I gave myself a task to complete A: so I wouldn't drive myself more crazy trying to do it all at the last minute and B: so the fondant pieces would have enough time to dry out. So by Wednesday when I started baking the first half of the cake layers (the oh so heavenly sour cream chocolate and peanut buttery goodness courtesy of Sky High), I had fondant crawfish and lemons all ready sculpted, painted and ready to go. Thursday saw the other half of the cake, a devils food cake from Food Network that I was completely and utterly disappointed with. Not that it was completely horrible but it just wasn't as good as I expect to serve to friends so let's just say that recipe quickly found its way to the recycling bin.

The big day for production was Friday since I wanted to leave Saturday for touch up only/cake crisis scenarios. I put the bottom half of the cake together with the devils food cake, knowing that the sour cream/peanut butter cake was just too soft to hold up to the weight of the decor. The frosting I had initially made for this cake was too soft so instead I slathered it with a good dollop of a basic chocolate buttercream. Once I shifted practically everything in the refrigerator, I let it sit for a while and started rolling out and coloring the fondant for the pot.

Of course with every single surface completely covered in pans, bowls, and god knows whatever else I could throw around my fondant rolling/production setup moved into the dining room. The cover for the pot was a round cake board I cut down to size and covered with fondant and then sprayed with edible silver spray to get that nice metallic look. I pulled the bottom half of the cake out and inserted dowel rods to keep everything together--6 that the cake board for the top half would rest on and one that ran the entire length of the cake. If I would have had the sense to complete the task properly, more rods would have gone in the top half to keep it together,  but alas it was far too late into the night for me to remember to do everything...so yea...there was a bit of an accident and not all the cake made it to the party in one piece...but for the most part it worked out fine.


Once I had the dowel rods set up, I put another cake board between the top half and the bottom half and stacked up my sour cream chocolate cake layers slathered with the oh so delicious peanut butter cream cheese frosting. From there it was just a matter of wrapping the fondant around the cake and throwing in all those lovely decorations I made and voila! A crawfish pot full of chocolatey awesomeness.

What I learned:

• Marzipan coated in cocoa powder--dead ringer for potatoes!
• Meringue mushrooms are pretty easy to make and a definite wow factor for any cake decoration or just on their own. 
• Sculpting figures with fondant is easy when you have a real 3D sample to reference. Here in Nola, crawfish are easy to get your hands on and when I told the guy at the seafood counter I just wanted "like 3 crawfish or so?", he thought I was cray cray. Even after I explained why, he just shrugged like okay lady....  Here's a close up of one of the first ones I did. The key parts: shape & texture. Getting the head and body the right shape and adding texture to the thorax are two really important details. I used black gel frosting (the kind you get in a tube) for the eyes and it was perfect! Also, I tinted the fondant red-ish (closer to a dark pink really) and then painted it with a vodka/red food coloring wash which gave it a great realistic look.
• Writing on a cake with those edible food markers is waaaayyy easier than doing it with icing. It gets a little getting used to, and once you do it you pretty much have to commit. That's the one advantage icing--if you mess up you can scrape it off and try try again.
• Fondant can get pretty heavy and soft cakes most likely won't hold up to it. Ideally this cake should have stayed in the refrigerator to help keep the cakes and icings a little more stable. By the time we got to the party a chunk of the top had decided not to stay with the rest of the cake. Luckily it was the back part and no one really noticed. 
• Standard cake boards will not hold up to a heavy cake. As much as I anticipated this cake would be heavy, I was still surprised at just how heavy it was. I used a masonite cake board that was very sturdy. When I first got it I was confident it would hold the cake...once I actually lifted the cake, I was less confident but it ended up working out fine.
• Always, always, always have back up plans. Whether it's a tried and true recipe you use all the time or something new you're experimenting with, you never want to be caught in a kitchen crisis with out a Plan B or even Plan C and maybe sometimes Plan D. I was so glad I stocked up on extra supplies like butter, sugar, and powdered sugar. One of my frosting's did not come out as planned and try as I did to salvage it, no amount of extra powdered sugar was making it as thick as it should have been. On to Plan B, which was just a quick chocolate buttercream that worked out great. Unfortunately I spent too much of my extra powdered sugar on Plan A that I didn't have enough left to make the buttercream I had planned to use as a filler on top the cake to make foamy/steamy bubbles popping out the top of the pot. Plan C meant using marshmallow fluff instead which gave it an interesting shine and drippyness that I liked, but of course was not in my original plan so while my husband thought it was purposely done in the back of my head I couldn't help but wonder what my actual plan would have looked like.  
• Friends are the best people to experiment on. They're forgiving when things go wrong, and the first to praise you when you hit the mark!