I'm in the middle of making a tottenham football shirt. It's all white with some navy details. It's due to be taken at 7am in the morning, 9 hours from now. Have had a busy busy day icing 2 dozen cupcakes, carving the shirt cake and 2 easter egg cakes for tomorrow and now my eldest daughter decided she would climb up to wear I put the cake out of her reach and smudged sticky fingerprints on it, pressed a lid off a pot into the icing and put some crumbled pink icing she had onto the pristine white of the shirt. I have no more white icing and no 24 hour stores nearby and would really like to go to bed at some point tonight but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anymore. So annoyed

aww sam, just read your post!! poor you, can you get the fondant off and re-roll it? or maybe make MMF ...... theres a recipe on here somewhere. hope you manage to get the cake out on time, you were loking forward to doing it too.

Can you try using vodka to get the pink stain out?

Okay, so by now you must have resolved all of your issue but it occurs to me that smudgy fingerprints on a sports jersey are perfectly acceptable... no, in fact they are more than just "acceptable" they are essential if you want the jersey to look realistic, right? Why not add a few more finger/hand prints in cocoa - dirt ... who ever heard of a pristine jersey anyway? "Real winners wear smudges"

I believe she's from the UK, so that means she has 7.5 hours left to fix, right?

thats right, she is from UK. I really hope she manages to fix it on time!

Hoping your delivery went okay! Let us know

Hello!
Well, hubby went to the 24 hour tesco, 20 miles away and got a loads of white ready roll icing. I even roped him into dying me some of it green to cover the board with! He works until 10pm at night and was nearly home when I called him to go to the shops! I re-iced the whole cake. I did have a think about covering the marks with 'dirt and grass' but I was so fed up I just wanted to do the thing again. Plus she had pressed a lid right in the fondant and I just couldn't have covered that up.
I got it covered and then sat in front of the tv in the lounge cutting out the blue detail and hand painting the rest on. I bought sugar paste to use with my letter cutters and I must be stupid but I cannot get the things to work with that or fondant covered in lots of icing sugar so ended up hand painting the wording while shaking from the large quantity of black coffee drunk to keep me awake!
I eventually crawled into bed at 4am this morning! I think it was just one of those cakes where it should have been simple, but everything was so fiddly and nothing went quite as I'd hoped. I've added the picture to my photos so feel free too have a look. It's definitely not my best work and I'm not that happy with it, but the lady was very pleased with it so I guess that's the important thing.
Thank you everyone for your suggestions!
Sam (hoping that no-one ever asked her for a football shirt cake ever again!)

Glad everything turned out well in the end I think the cake looks great.

Is it the tappits you were struggling with? I find that flower paste works best with those.

Good job ! The cake looks fine - hope you got some rest. Thanks also for teaching a Yank a new word - " fiddly" - I look forward to using it often!

the cake is great. glad it turned out well for you. yes i agree, use flowerpaste with your cutters and roll it thinly, you shouldnt have any trouble then.

Argh, sorry I checked the pack and it is flower paste! I tried it all different thicknesses to see if that was the problem but I just seem to be completely unable to do them properly I can use some of the letters. I know it sounds silly but I can get the ones out that on the ends of the strip if you know what I mean. As I I can't get any use out of the letter A. I have taken to tapping them pretty hard on the work top and the centre letter on the strip come out ok but the rest won't. So disappointed, I was really excited to make use of them.

sam, if you dip your cutter in icing sugar first to avoid sticking, put icing suar also on your worktop then roll a strip of flowerpaste thinly. press your desired letter onto flowerpaste and while you press it, move it back and forth. when you lift the cutter give it a firm tap on edge of worktop and it will pop out. may take more than one tap. leave it for a few seconds before moving it because it wil firm up a little bit and be easier to handle. hope this works for you.

Also, wait a minute or so after rolling and before cutting -- it helps if the paste is a little bit dry before you begin cutting.