Sean's birthday cake, the flop...

Every year since Sean and I have been together (almost 5 years) I have made him a cake for his birthday. I do this not only because I love baking and love baking for him, but because he never got a party or cake for his birthday, which is on Christmas Eve. He always has his family's Christmas festivities on Christmas Eve and his family doesn't really put an emphasis on his birthday. It's more about the Christmas aspect.

This round, I was playing with the idea of a Skyrim cake. He loves playing that game and I thought it would be a great idea to make the logo dragon.

This is what the logo he wanted on the cake:

This is how the caked ended up:

So, let's explain the method to my madness...
I wanted to make the dragon out of fondant and Sean wanted it to be grey. So I drew out the dragon on a piece of paper with all the details that it shown in the picture (minus the highlight and shadow). Next I cut out the sketch and place it on the fondant. After that I take a knife and cut into the fondant. That didn't really work out so I started tracing over the sketch. That didn't work either. My last idea was to look at the sketch and free hand it. Because of all the details, the fondant being difficult to cut, and sucky knives...I couldn't get all the details like I wanted.
When I was finished with the dragon I got the white fondant out and started to roll it out.
I worked on the cake as well. I used a 9x13" pan. The cake was pretty thin, so I decided to cut it in half and make two layers. The cake didn't turn out the way I wanted because it was really uneven. I tried to even it out by cutting off some of it...but I think that only made it worse.
The I iced the cake...that went horrible as well...I should have stuck it on the fridge or freezer to harden up...
Finally I took the white fondant, put it on the cake, took black gel and water and painted it black. I wanted it to look like it was painted with a paint brush and have some brush strokes shown.

Overall, I am definately not happy with the cake...but there is always next year to improve. I know what I need to work on and there are a ton of events for my to practice my cake skills.