Texas Hold ‘em Cake

Some friends of ours were having a summer picnic and a Texas Hold ‘em game, (yes I am slightly behind in my posts).  I was asked to bring a cake and decided to make a small poker table. 

I started with a round cake and cut the sides to make a six-sided table.  The cake was frosted with green buttercream frosting, and black fondant around the edges of the cake. I used square pillars with a Wilton cake plate under the cake and covered the pillars with black fondant to look like table legs.

The playing cards and poker chips are made of fondant and I used fine tip edible markers to draw the cards.   The fun part was deciding the how the hand was going to play out.  Even Doug got involved in helping with this part.  Can you tell which hand wins?

The not so fun part of this cake was the fact that it was WAY too hot for fondant.  I used a brand of fondant that didn’t hold up well in the heat and it was melting pretty bad.  Now I know some people don’t put their cakes in the refrigerator, but I always do and 99% of the time I don’t have a problem.  Plus with this soft fondant I wanted to try to firm it up a bit.  But it was so hot and humid that when I took the cake out it literally started dripping black liquid!  I set it up between two fans and dabbed off some of the moisture.  The texture you see on the black was from me dabbing with a paper towel.  The funny thing is, everyone kept asking “how did you make it look like leather?”  I just said “bake on a hot summer day!”