Chess Themed Cake

The finished chess cake

My husband is very keen on chess, and so, for his birthday I have decided to make a chess themed cake. After much cake decorating research, I decided that I would use fondant icing to make the chess pieces and the chess board for the cake.
The fondant recipes that I found looked so tedious that I bought black and white ready made fondant from the cake decorating store. It cost me approximately $10 a kg.
Creating chess pieces out of fondant proved more difficult than I had imagined as the fondant becomes really quite soft when it is being worked with. The black fondant also stained my hands after playing with it for a couple hours making the pieces. My chessmen were stretching out of shape all over the place and slowly tipping over. Finally I managed to get together enough pieces which looked like chessmen to use for the cake decoration. I wanted 24 chess pieces as it was my husband's 24th birthday. 
Below are some of the pictures during construction.

Some of the chess men

Rolling out the fondant icing

I measured 2cm squares

Iced mud cake

Placing the chess board squares on the cake

The chess men all in place

It was a beautiful mud cake recipe!!

My husband was very impressed and the cake tasted lovely! The fondant pieces are all edible, however, I find fondant rather too sweet so we pulled them off before eating. The chess board squares are thin enough to eat and enjoy! If I were to try something like this again, I would make sure that the top of the cake is absolutely flat as my chess board had some interesting contours. The fondant was really good to work with though, and very effective. I will probably try using it again to decorate cakes.