Number Cake for a 70th Birthday

I have always wanted to make a number cake. When I discovered that it was my dad's 70th birthday, I knew this was my chance. This past Saturday was my dad's actual birthday and we all went out for a big family dinner at Kirin Restaurant. In fact, it seemed like every table was celebrating someone's birthday. Either that or it was a wedding. The hosts and servers were pretty much singing Happy Birthday all night. Lol.

I found a clever cheat sheet on how to make any number cake out of a basic square and round cake. I was able to use one 8 inch round and a large rectangular pan to create both my "7" and "0." I had to double the recipe to fill both pans and in the end, I had just a bit of cake leftover. I made nutella cake with nutella swiss meringue buttercream. It's my favorite and since I was the cake maker, I was the one who got to decide :) Not that anyone objected since I only got positive feedback on my cake. My brother-in-law even said the fondant was good since it was nice and thin and complimented the cake well :) I tried! I know fondant is sweet so I always use the thinnest covering humanly possible. But of course that makes it very delicate and a pain to work with. Ha!

Clever, right?

What was leftover for us to enjoy :) Yum, yum.

The cake was trickier than I thought to cover with fondant just because I was doing it freestyle without any measurements. Now that I have gone through the process, I would have covered the top first before the sides. Oops. The cake wasn't high but it was extremely wide. The numbers took up so much space that I had to go to Rona, a local home improvement center, just to purchase a sheet of plastic styro to create a cake board. Crazy, right?! It worked out well though so I was pleased :) And phew! I almost gave up on the idea of making this cake since I didn't have a cake board large enough. Thanks Rona for saving my butt! :)

A big happy 70th to my Dad!!!

Thin fondant veil :)