A Book Cake For My Mom

Here is the book cake I made for my mom's birthday in March. She is a huge fan of Dean Koontz and it seems like Lightning is the book that she is always recommending to other people. So I thought it would be fun to make her birthday cake look like a Dean Koontz book and I picked Lightning. To make this I first searched for images of the cover of the book. I mostly came up with the more updated version but when I came across this one I had to use it because it looked a little older and more like the the books I was always seeing laying around the house when I was a kid. I changed the scale so it would fit just right on half of a 9 by 13 in. cake and printed it off. Then I baked a cake (white of course- my mom's favorite) in a 9 by 13 inch pan and cut some off the top to make it level, then I cut it in half and each half would become a book. I wanted it to look like two books stacked on top of each other. I iced three sides of the bottom book in white to be the pages. Then I made some black icing and iced it on one side and the top. Then I stacked the next half on top. I iced it the same way and let it stand for a while for the icing the to get stiff. Then I used the gel to transfer my tracing of the book cover onto the top book and filled in the letters and illustration with the right color icing. I also made sure to pipe a very thin line around the bottom edge of each of the cakes to look like the back cover. One more thing I should mention about this cake was that I iced the black parts the night before and I did just have the cake sitting on a white cardboard cake circle. Well during the night the black food coloring kind of leaked out onto the cardboard so I covered another piece in foil and my sister helped me ever-so-carefully transfer the whole thing from one circle to the other. So just fyi, it is probably a good idea to always cover those cardboard cake circles with foil anyways but especially if you are using black icing. I think everyone really liked how this cake came out, it was definitely more fun then just the standard old birthday cake.