I'm making a free cake for my nephew. He's turning 3 and my sister says he couldnt decide on a theme (a same mom probably would have helped him choose) so she decided to mix and match Barney, Dora, Spiderman, Elmo and Cars.
That's a lot. I was thinking of a square cake and doing one theme on each side. But i want it to look nice. It needs to be a small cake too. I'd it to be very colorful and I dont mind working with fondant, but I'm not that good at this yet.
I was considering having edible images done at walmart but I dont think they'll do the characters. Now what?
Maybe you can do a car with all of them in it or gathered together like for a party or something? This way you wouldn't have so many separate themes going on and it would pull them together.
I can't wait to find out what you come up with. That's definitely a lot of different themes! 
if it were me....I would just do one theme. So you have a Barney cake and spiderman plates, dora table cloth, cars napkins, and an elmo pinata. No biggie!
But you could do a "cartoon" cake and do say chocolate transfers or colorflow of the differnt characters and place them all around the cake.
Wow that is alot of themes for one cake. The only thing I can thing of is to do transfers, have spider man up in the corner of the cake hanging on some spider webs, then have Dora, Barney and Elmo playing together with grass around them and make a road alongside with lightning McQueen on it. This is alot for a small cake but if you take pictures and can get them shrunk you could put them all on a cake.
When does the cake have to be done for? I have an edible image printer if I can be of help
Since you aren't that experienced with fondant and the child is only 3... why not have the mom buy little figurines and have them sitting/standing around a "birthday party table" cake? The table settings and birthday items on the table (i.e. a cake, presents, plates, etc) will give you a little more experience w/fondant and the child will get to play with the characters when the party is over.
My sister is nuts. She doesnt even care what the cake looks like and I'm sure he's too little to care either. The cake is for this Saturday. She just sent the invitations yesterday. I swear, some people. She's lucky I didnt have another cake to do. I'm leaning towards trying to do chocolate transfers (for the first time) and then maybe decorating the cake to be a two tier topys turvy with lots of colors. Then I'll have each chocolate transfer on a lollypop stick in the top tier. I figure if the tiers are small we can just call the top tier a smash cake, then it wont seem like so much wasted cake.
I would do a car shaped cake with the characters hanging out of the windows.
Bake the cake, decorate it, shove the characters into the window areas and touch up where you inserted them.
The only other thing I can suggest is to do a baby block style pattern on a sheet cake and do one character per block.
Those are A LOT of themes to pull into one. I wish you the best of luck with it.
Well after my last baby block cake I will NEVER try that again. I think its my inexperience but it was totally awful.
I like the idea of the car with the charactes in the windows but I just dont think I'm that good yet.
gotcha on the blocks.
let me think some on this car thing. I'll be back in a bit
Ok I'm back with my idea...
Since I am a business I do not endorse anyone using this graphic for profit. Doing the whole image thing leave me uncomfy because of the copyright laws because that's what I'm used to saying on this subject.
Since you are doing this free I'll share my idea...
I had to shrink it so it wasn't so huge on here and nothing is proportioned right either since I slapped it together. 
I would do something like this as an edible image on the top of the sheet cake.
If you haven't done an edible image now's the perfect time to try. hehe You gotta start somewhere and a free cake for a 3 year old is the best way to do it. 
Call your local Wal*Mart if it's a super store w/bakery.
They dhould do it.
You need to take the color image with you, but ask them if the want it printed or on a CD etc.
Hope my um... idea helps. If you want to see the larger version PM me.
Its little late for me to jump in ,but my son who is going to be 3 in Jan also wants a cake with mickey mouse ,wigggles ,and animals on it .So for now I am planning on a jungle cake , with all the disney characters attending his birthday.But that is a lot of work for this weekend.Good luck.
Ok I started thinking. I have a wedding cake to do next month that is a topsy turvy cake and I'd like the practice. Plus I realized that while my sister said she only sent 8 invites so she didnt need much cake, she lives with like 11 other people (so wierd) so that raises my number of servings. I was thinking of a 2 tier topys turvy, that should give me enough servings, and if it's a smaller number of people he can eat the top tier as a smash cake.
So I baked my alternating sizes last night, and I'll try and put it all together tonight. I'm thinking chocolate transfers on lollypop sticks coming out of the top. If that doesnt work, I'll be running around town tomorrow looking for little toy figures.
i just thought about something ... can you just do color copies of the different characters and stick them on toothpics or small dowels. Then you could make a bright cheery cake with a bow and stick the different guys (and gal) in there ... could be really cute and not too difficult.
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