Nativity Cake (Click photo to enlarge).

I'm so far behind on posting my December and January cakes!  Christmas was a total and utter blur, and in between the blurriness, I had about a dozen orders to fill, a ton of baking to do for friends, mine and Gary's coworkers, our neighbors, and family - and then there was a request for this manger scene in all fondant.  That was cool, but the tough part of this cake was that I was asked to make the characters look "real" and not like "cartoons."  Um, but it's CAKE!  So yeah, wow, that was hard for me to wrap my mind around.  Remember, I've been doing this for just over 6 months, so that's a pretty tall order for a noobie like me.  I redid the angel 3 times.  I redid her face, I redid her wings, I redid her stumpy little body, I redid her hair.  She was blonde, she was brown, she was black.  After I began my 6th hour of nothing but angel-work, I finally just tossed the entire thing in the garbage can and started fresh.  Although this last version was an improvement on the first 3 that ended up filed in #13, she was still nothing like I had envisioned her to be - and I was NOT a happy girl with her or with this cake in general.  The actual manger was made from tempered chocolate and was the one thing I liked about this cake.  It seemed like the characters just all gave me so much trouble.  Just as I was wrapping baby Jesus in his swaddling clothes, I dented his head beyond repair.  But I couldn't bear to cut off his little baby Jesus head, so I gently squished him back into a ball and started over.  Even though I avoided the sugar carnage of a beheading, I still cringed at the thought of squishing him.  But it was the lesser of all the evils - as it seemed better to save his head than to throw him in the garbage.  And yeah, this was 3 days before Christmas, so I was feeling pretty guilty about having to dispose of Jesus.  It's a wonder Santa came to see me at all after all the havoc I wreaked on his "manger players."  Maybe that explains why I didn't get that set of square cake pans I wanted.