Carnival (popcorn, hotdog, and fries) birthday cake...

This year Sude had a carnival themed birthday party.
I will have a separate post with the party details and the pictures later.

But a separate post MUST be dedicated to the cake. It was so much fun to make it.
I have browsed the web for a while to find the perfect cake. After combining ideas from different places, I decided to make a cake that is made of 3 items; a popcorn bag filled with popcorn, a hot dog, and french fries.

Ingredients:
3 boxed rainbow cakes
5 white vanilla icing (store bought cups)
4 packets of fruit roll ups
4 tablespoon of corn syrup
1 bag of mini marshmallows
2 teaspoons of cocoa
Green and yellow sugar candies
Food colorings

I have started with baking 3 rainbow cakes the day before I assembled the cake;
2 of them in  13" X 9" pans
1 smaller pan but still rectangular (the cake needs to be thicker for the hot dog)

I used the two bigger cakes to assemble the popcorn bag.
-  I started with cutting off the edges of each cake.
-  Then I split the cakes into two equal parts from the middle.
-  Then I put 4 cake pieces on top each other and sliced off the sides to make it shape like a popcorn bag. (I kept the scrapings to be used to make the hot dog)

- Then I spread icing between every layer and also on top. You can put the cake into refrigerator after the first layer of icing to cover the popcorn bag which would make it easier to spread the second layer.

The icing does not have to be perfect since it is a "popcorn bag". Mine wrinkled a little bit while I was working on it.
-  Then, I used fruit roll ups to make the bag's red stripes.

-  Then I put my kids to work to make the popcorn. You will need a bag of mini marshmallows. I used kitchen scissors to slit the edge of each marshmallow. You need to snip the edge of the marshmallow twice (rotate the scissors 90 degrees after the first cut) to give it a popcorn look.
-  Next I mixed yellow food coloring to a few table spoons of corn syrup. With a toothpick, you can paint some part of the popcorn to yellow so that it would have a butter effect. I painted the inside of the cuts (kids and my husband helped a lot). This is up to you, you can keep the marshmallows white, but they looked very nice with the "butter".
- While kids were coloring the popcorn, I took the smaller cake and shaped like a hot dog bun (see the next picture). I kept the center cake that I cut off to be used to make the french fries.

-  Then I covered the hot dog bun with white icing and refrigerated it for 10 minutes or so.
-  Then I placed all of the marshmallows on top of the bag. Actually Korman did most of that. He may have eaten some of them while working hard... It was a tough job after all.

- While the cake was in the refrigerator, I added a little bit brown coloring to the icing to make the a bun color. I covered the bun with that icing.
- Next, I prepared the hot dog. I used all of the cake scrapes left over from the popcorn bag. I added 1/2 cup of icing, 2 teaspoons of cocoa, a little bit of red food coloring to the cake crumbles and mixed it up in a bowl. I let it sit in the refrigerator until it was firmer and more manageable. Then I rolled it to make it a hot dog and placed it into the bun.

Then I started decorating;
- Yellow and green chopped candy for relish and onions
- Mustard color icing (use yellow, orange, and little green)

- Next, it was time for the french fries. I cut up the middle leftover cake piece from the hot dog bun to french fries shape pieces. I placed them to the top shelf of the oven with broiler on. It only took few minutes to brown them, so you need to be careful. I rotated them few times to make sure all sides were baked. Then I arranged them like french fries.

- Last but not least, I made ketchup with corn syrup and red/green food coloring. But if I had to do this again, I would use icing to make the ketchup for the hot dog. It was the right consistency for the fries but it did not work as well for the hot dog.

The final product was still remarkable...