A Tiki Birthday Cake

For the Coconut Cake:  I used this Coconut Layer Cake recipe from All Recipes.

For the Mango Curd: I used this Starfruit Curd recipe from Global Table Adventure as a base and substituted the juice of one large fresh ripe mango for the starfruit.

For the Buttercream: I used what was leftover in my fridge from a batch of Magnolia Bakery’s Vanilla Buttercream.

For the Marshmallow Fondant:

Ingredients:

• Cover the inside of a heat safe bowl, a wooden spoon, your mixer’s bowl and the dough hook attachment with Crisco or shortening.
• Place marshmallows and water in the bowl.
• Microwave the marshmallows for 30 seconds at a time stirring the mixture in between with the wooden spoon.
• When the mixture is the consistency of Marshmallow Fluff, transfer it to your mixer fitted with the dough hook and mix in the powdered sugar one cup at a time until the fondant is formed..
• Cover your work surface with powdered sugar and cover your hands with Crisco or shortening.
• Dump the fondant on the sugared surface and knead the fondant adding more powdered sugar if needed to make it less sticky.
• Separate the fondant into different parts and color as desired by adding a few drops of gel colors at a time and kneading it in until the color is evenly distributed and you get the color you want. 
• Wrap each piece in plastic wrap until you use it.
• Wrap leftover fondant tightly in plastic cling film and store in a zip lock bag.

Making the Tiki Cake:

I used a set of 5″ in diameter springform pans to bake the layers in. This recipe made one extra layer than I needed but it was gobbled up with the cake.

After baking and cooling the layers I trimmed them, spread the mango curd in between and then crumb coated the mini cake tower with buttercream.

Most of the fondant was colored brown with paste gel (you could also make chocolate fondant) but I used the process of adding the brown color to leave parts of it swirled in to resemble wood.

The mouth and the nose was sculpted out of the same brown fondant. I used plain white for the eyes and the teeth. The remaining fondant was divided into pieces and colored to make the geometric color patches, the flowers on top, eyeballs, tongue and trim.