the confectionary evolution of a pig

I rather enjoy those getting to know you activities where you list your hobbies because I can feel proud of the eclecticism that is me. I enjoy all my hobbies and  find great satisfaction in my accomplishments; but occasionally, I think I should develop a useful talent in addition fun ones. It remains to be seen if I will succeed in that in the second half of this assignment, but for this first part the difficulty was finding something that I can do that someone else would want to do.
Here follows a list of what I considered, and rejected, as possible topics.
balloon animals, zombie makeovers, hybridizing kitchen appliances, chicken plucking, fossil preparation, calligraphy, and swing lifts.
When I discovered someone in my complex had a birthday, the choice was clear FONDANT CAKE.
Fondant is sort of like icing that you roll out instead of spread with a knife. It s used to get a very smooth finish and is usually found on wedding cakes. It is beautiful and elegant. This is what the girls in my complex were hoping to create:
  that was a rather daunting thought tiered cakes are tricky and take special tools, but they, however unwisely, had perfect confidence in me. So we forged ahead.

 They enjoyed how to make the fondant. We used a combination of water, marshmallow, flavoring, coloring, and powdered sugar. Traditional, and expensive, fondant is made with eggs and sometimes almond paste. They said kneading it to make is pliable and to evenly distribute the color reminded them of being in preschool playing with salt dough.

We rolled out the fondant, and made a giant sticky mess. This picture is before the rolling. We ended up with powdered sugar everywhere, bits of fondant permanently adhered to the table and us.
I hadn't anticipated the increased mess that three people trading off the rolling pin would make. As we traded spots to roll, we invariably knocked the table, dropped the rolling pin, or flung powdered sugar across the room. Working with multiple people complicates relatively simple tasks especially if some are unfamiliar with them.

The real complications ensued as we prepared the cake for the fondant. The cake was too fluffy and crumbly and the frosting too runny. The combination led to a collapsing shifting mass of pastry. Ideally for laying fondant you want a fairly level firm cake because the fondant is heavy and the cake needs to support its mass. Being the resident expert was now more difficult, I could not just summon my own expert to solve the collapsing cake problem. So we went for a contingency plan: adapt the cake design to match the resources we actually had. 

We spread the fondant and I showed them how to lay it so it is smooth. The new plan worked fine until the top layer of the cake started sliding off. Fortunately, the fondant held the cake together. 

In the end, we did not end up with a beautiful smooth pink polka-dot cake; we had a pink and purple pig with little piglets. Being the authority was harder than I had thought, This was mostly because, although I am good at simple things with cake decorating, I do not know how to solve more complicated problems. I was grateful to have pupils who were excited to learn and thrilled with a confectionary pig instead of a beautiful pint demi-wedding cake.