I am making a cake with the Harley Davidson logo on it. I looked in the galleries and there are a lot of good ones. I have an idea of how I want to do mine (with fondant), but my main question is how do I do the letters in fondant? Do you cut them out on computer paper and just trace them on fondant? That is what I am thinking, but I wanted to make sure. Thank you.

I just uploaded photos of a Harley cake with a similar emblem. I used colored gumpaste rather than fondant, but the process would have been the same.

I found regular paper too flimsy, so I printed the emblem on cardstock, then carefully cut out all the letters and shapes with an Xacto knife. I rolled the paste uniformly thin (I used a pasta roller), and let it dry several minutes, until the point where you would think it was almost TOO dry to cut. This keeps it from moving around and in my experience produces much sharper edges.

I tried tracing the templates with the knife, but that didn't work well. Instead, I rubbed a small rolling pin over the template (RUBBED, not ROLLED, as that distorted the paste), then cut out the impressed shape with the Xacto knife. I left them in place to dry.

After a couple of days drying, they were very firm but had faded, so I touched them up with a paint mixture of petal dust and vodka, and for the black background, a mixure of gel, dust and vodka. Oh, for the black background I did start with a 50/50 mixture of black fondant and gumpaste, having read that you just can't get stuff dyed black enough.

I glued the pieces together using equal parts meringue powder and water.

Check out my photos to see how the emblem turned out.

Here's another option:

I make my letters using a template and Royal Icing. You can get the vinyl sheets at a craft store (Hobby Lobby carries them in my area.) for about $1-3. Then just print out your logo, and tape it to the underside of the vinyl so that when you flip it over you can see the image through the vinyl. After that, just cut out the letters using a sharp exacto knife (you might need to press a little - and take your time through the curves.) Finally, once your template is complete and you have placed it on the cake or gumpaste where it should go, using RI colored the way you like, spread a thin film of RI over the template being careful to keep it all on the template. Then VERY CAREFULLY lift the template away from the cake and Voila! You can see what the end result looks like if you look at the Zebra Print cookies in my photos.

Grandmom, that emblem looks fantastic! Thanks for sharing the info. I had a really hard time with my UFC Tapout logo. I did it all freehand. I wish I would have known about your method then.

I agree - grandmom your Harley cake is fantastic.

There is this gal at work who has a Harley and I have thought about doing a Harley cake for her but was so undecided on how to go about it. (I do cakes as a hobby.) Now I have two options on how to go about doing this.

Thanks