Elephant theme birthday cake - my first real project

Hi all,
As mentioned on my last post that I have been trusted to create a birthday cake for my good friend's son first birthday party. I got a brief that the theme is elephant and this is what I got as a brief.

The brief: party banner with matching table cover my friend got from the party supplies shop

I was quite lucky caused I got the brief early and since I had to go for approx. 3 weeks to overseas and due to be back just 5 days before the party I prepared the decorations early. Firstly I did the blue elephant with fondant mixed with tylose powder to make it quicker to set. I also did the mushrooms, sun, bees and beach ball in advance. But forgot to take pictures of them in exception of the elephant. Here's the picture of the blue elephant done probably a month in advance.

The blue elephant

Ok, so me and BakerzMum started baking the cakes on Friday night, we have to bake 6 layers of cake in total. We used 25cm and 20cm baking tins and we need 3 layers of cakes for each tier. It turned out quite high, higher that we expected as we never did a trial with 3 layers before. The only think that quite surprising for us is actually 20 cm and 25 cm cakes when placed on top of each other was to similar in width and we just found out like 11pm the night before the party so we have to go with the plan plus we don't have any smaller cake tin hehehhe.

Bottom tier, iced with butter cream icing my first time working with butter cream icing

Finally we finished the cake and it's like 00.30 am covering the cake with that high with fondant is not as easy I thought it would be and we're running out of royal icing so the middle part between the tiers is still bare.

The cake, finished and the 'sun' is up I had to use 5 wires for the 'sung because it's quite heavy. I'm happy with the 'sun' and it added color to the cake

details on the top tier

Details on the bottom tier

Surprisingly, the most challenging part of the decoration is the 'beach ball' I ended up using jawbreaker and cover it with fondant.

love the mushrooms, they added color to the cake and make it more attractive

Another look of the cake

The process might be not as smooth as I thought it would be but I think the cake turn out quite alright. The fondant cover on the cake was creaking and I had some hole I have to patched and I spent nearly 2 hours and 6 attempts to cover the bottom tier and had a major breakdown because the fondant was cracking and tearing and not long enough. But after I put up the decoration at least the cake looked quite presentable. I would like to thanks my dear friend that trusted me with this job, and thanks for her compliment for this less than perfect cake. One thing for sure I have to practice more on covering cake with fondant especially the bigger cake. Thanks all for checking out, I will update you with my next project.