**Photo heavy. Please let this one load. ** One of my best friends in Ireland had a little boy who is celebrating his first birthday today. The birthday party theme is “circus”, and as a part of it, I was asked to make the 3 ring circus cakes.

I’ve made cakes before, and decorated them with regular icing and piping. However, this one was a challenge. This was my first time working with roll out icing, and I’m not sure I would do it again, though I’m quite happy with how they turned out. Everyone at the party was quite impressed.

The first thing I did was Wednesday night, when I baked 3 marble cakes. There were 2 9-inch, and 1 12 inch made in the pan.

Thursday night, I frosted each one with a beautiful chocolate icing. Then, I added the rolled out frosting to the top and smoothed it out. Once that was complete, the decorating began.

Colored Fondant was rolled out in green and red, and I cut out diamonds, circles, and little “flag” shapes to go around the edges of two of the cakes. For the third, the tops and bottoms of what would become the circus train were cut out and attached using sugar paste glue. I also added marshmellows (for the platforms for the animals) and some edible printed cupcake decorations which had the “tent”, “ring master”, and “clowns”.

At that point, I also added some words in colored icing, and then decided to let everything set up because it was midnight, and the Barnum’s animal crackers that mom had shipped from the US hadn’t arrived yet. On Saturday, I headed to the party a couple hours early – with the needed bits to complete the cake. Luckily, J’s package from the US had arrived – with Barnum’s Animal Crackers – so I could complete the cakes.

Slowly, I sorted through the animals, attaching the Elephants, Bears, Seals, Giraffes, Lions, and tigers around the larger of the cakes. Then, I added chocolate “bars” to each of the Circus train car carriages.

To the top of each cake, I took a pair of scissors and “snipped” the top of each marshmellow and added the Animal biscuits inside. Then came the “decorating” of the marshmellows – to look like “drums” and adding of gumdrops (also in the shape of the “drums”) and other little details. This “completed” the 3 cakes, of the three ring circus.

In the end, they turned out looking pretty great, and with the addition of the candles (one for each cake – he was turning 1 – not 3) it looked pretty spectacular, now, let’s eat!