Original Superhero Comic birthday cake

So my son draws comics. Often. He has one superhero comic character that he draws quite often that he calls Brettboy. For his birthday, I made Brettboy into icing and put him on the birthday cake!  Wanna see?

Well?

Brett loved it!  I love it! It turned out so much better than I expected.

Want to see how I did it?
First I made Brett draw the character about the size I wanted and then I made 3 photocopies of it (this is a delicate operation! I needed extras just in case one broke!)

I taped it to a platter and taped a piece of waxed paper over top of it.  Then I made black royal icing and piped the outline. CLICK HERE for my recipe and a tutorial from Cookie Week. 

 I made him three times. :)

 Then I waited a few hours for the outline to dry. If I didn't, I could have not only messed up the outline, but the black food coloring would have certainly bled into the white. Then I let the whole thing sit overnight to dry completely.

 Here is Brett when he first saw the Brettboys in icing. He was very excited!

 I managed to get Brettboy on the cake, only breaking his neck!  (I had a feeling I would, but once he was on the cake, we could hardly tell.)  I took the body (and then the head) and added just a teeny bit of wet royal icing to the back to use as glue.

 I used a black Americolor food dye pen to draw his face.  That was nicer than I expected.  Royal icing dries nice and hard.

It was at this point I wished I had made the speech bubble the same way! Instead I piped the black outline straight on the cake. I let it dry a few hours, then filled it in with white. Unfortunatey the white never dried completely, so when I wrote "Happy Birthday" the point of the pen dug into the icing a little bit. Oops!

 I used the "B" symbol that Brett drew on his comic and more wax paper to make a bunch of symbols.  I would either use one for the top of the Brettboy on the cake, or, if I had enough not break, use them around the side of the cake.
(The rectangle above the B is a burrito- because it's Brettboy's favorite food.)

 Here is the final cake. I used royal icing to glue the B symbol to the Brettboy and also had enough to go around the cake. We think it turned out pretty awesome!

My next post will be the cookies I made to match!!