Plans for House Warming Cake

My brother-in-law and his lovely girlfriend are throwing a party this weekend at their new town home. The whole family is invited! I'm really looking forward to it because all the babies will be there and my little Zoey can play with her cousins. Here are some of the plans I have for creating a house warming cake.

Design:

• 8" round cake
• covered in green buttercream
• fondant white picket fence on the side (held up with white royal icing)
• fondant welcome mat on top
• grass icing surrounding the mat
• flowers and vines in various places all over the cake

Cake:

• pound cake by Paula Deen (minus 1/2 cup of sugar as the reviews posted suggest)
• IMBC
• Pillsbury cream cheese frosting as filling

Here's a photo of a welcome mat that I'll be modeling the fondant after:


Here's my home-made template:


I'll shoot for a light brown tinted fondant and black royal icing. Hopefully I can tint the icing dark enough. This is an excellent exercise for me to practice line piping with royal icing. For texture, hopefully pressing a paper towel to the fondant will achieve an appropriate imprint.

Here's a white picket fence:


The plan is to roll out white fondant and make thin strips. These strips will be cut to the same length, most likely 2". If I have time, the tops of the strips can be decoratively cut. There will be 2 royal icing rings around the cake that the strips will have to adhere to. I think I can mark ring placement on the cake by placing it on the lazy Susan and pressing a knife point to it while it spins.

My original idea was to have a cross stitch "Home Sweet Home" instead of the welcome mat:

But I decided that a cross stitch laying on a front lawn would be kind of weird. It was a nifty idea though. It was based off of an Ace of Cakes episode I saw. One of the decorators was tasked to make a cake for a woman that had cross stitched many Christmas stockings for her family. So she took some fondant and laid it on top of cross stitch patterns, then laid that on top of a light box. She followed the pattern with little x's of icing and in the end it looked like a lovely cross stitched work of art. I made make-shift light box out of a plastic bin, small lamp, and glass door (from our entertainment center). I will use it to decorate the welcome mat.