Help!!!
I will be celebrating my daughter's 2nd birthday this saturday and need your expertise in helping to turn an undecorated costco cake into a barnyard cake.I loved the beautiful barnyard cakes on this site, but I am a novice at cake making and decorating .I will be making the food for the party myself and hence dont have time or confidence to try out anything new .How can i transform a simple costco white butercream cake into a barnyard without using fondant or having to scupt anything?
I was hoping to have the cake look like the one in the picture below:
http://cakecentral.com/gallery/1841983

I am open to using food color sprays/working with buttercream.
Thanks.

This would be a pretty easy cake to start with. You will need a buttercream recipe-and there are many on this site. I prefer Indydebi's bc, and here is a link to the recipe:
http://cakecentral.com/recipes/indydebis-crisco-based-buttercream-icing/
You will have to color the bc with gel colors (You can get some made by Wilton at Walmart). Regular liquid food colors are not concentrated enough.

The small animals, fence, weather vane, and sun are cut from fondant. You can buy packages of precolored fondant at Walmart or other stores with cake supplies. Just find a coloring book of animals or print some coloring pages from the web, and cut them out. Then use them as patterns to cut the animals from fondant.

If you've never worked with fondant, it's kind of like clay or play dough. Just knead it until it is soft and pliable, roll it out on a lightly greased surface until it is pretty thin, then cut out the shapes using a sharp knife like an exacto knife. You could also use a pizza cutter for long thin strips like the fence.

The barn is piped using a star tip. You could also just cut that out from fondant, if you wanted.

Hope this helps. Good luck.

Hi poohsmama,

Thank you so much for your suggestions.

The background of the cake is made out of blue and green buttercream , right?I am worried about making the cake too heavy by putting more buttercream on top of the already frosted cake.
Do you have any suggestions on what i could do?
Thanks once again.

I would suggest getting the primary colors and neutral colors of Wilton fondant and just have fun cutting out the shapes that you need to make all the animals and barnyard scene. That's the only way NOT to add more buttercream to the cake. I have used a round cutter to make a cow and a pig before. It's not realistic, just a representation of the animals and a small child will appreciate a simplistic looking animal. Just use black icing tube to pipe on the eyes, nose and other features to make a cow or pig (animals that babies recognize).

I agree with all of Poohsmomma's suggestions. Why don't you get the costco cake with a border, usually they use the shell shape border. (That would be less pipping for you to worry about) For the background you don't need to add anymore buttercream, I suggest you use the wilton color spray cans. Get one in blue and one in green spray on until you're satisfied with the outcome and let it dry a but just so you don't smear or make a big mess. Then just add all the other details just as Poohsmomma mentioned.

If you want to buy the Wilton sprays-green and blue- you could cover the bottom with a paper towelor parchment paper and spray the sky area blue. Then when it dries, you could mask the sky area and spray the grass area green. It won't matter if the colors run or mix a little because you can hide that with the barn and fence.

I wouldn't suggest adding the blue and green buttercream to the already iced cake. I've decorated Costco cakes for someone before and in my experience their buttercream is very soft and will not allow you to spread anything over it without smearing the icing and tearing the cake.

Maybe you could use Wilton edible color paper( walmart or micheals) for the blue and green, then make a small batch of buttercream to pipe the house. You can use fondant for the animals.
HTH