Remember when I posted a little insight on THIS pizza cake I had made? Well, I recently had another order for one of those cakes and I was determined to find some better alternatives for the toppings. While fondant and modeling chocolate do allow for some seriously realistic looking toppings, they don’t taste stellar and I wanted everyone to be able to enjoy all of the toppings on the cake. I did a little experimenting and some thinking out of the box (and the cake aisle), to come up with delicious alternatives that look just as realistic as the fondant toppings. Continue on to see what I came up with.

Follow along with the initial post HERE for tips on how to get the cake setup to look like a pizza. For the toppings, below you’ll find what I used this time around. The italicized toppings are updates from the last post.

Pizza Cake Toppings:

• Pizza Sauce: Royal icing. I mixed confectioner’s sugar mixed with water, dyed it a deep red (w/ red and maroon gel color), then added lightly to the cake’s concave center with a spatula.
• Cheese (#1): Grated white chocolate and then sprinkled it atop the “sauce” immediately after it was applied to the pizza (before the icing sets!).
• Black Olives (#2): Tootsie rolls! I cut thin (olive sized) slices with a knife, and then used a skewer to poke a hole through each center. I used my black edible marker to add on some true black coloring to the top of each olive before topping it on my pizza cake.
• Onions (#3): For the onions I sliced green apple soft licorice candies into thin pieces. The licorice gets a rough texture once cut and really looks like an opaque onion.
• Mushrooms (#4): For the mushrooms I used marshmallows…well, the ends of marshmallows. With each marshmallow, I cut off the ends and placed them on wax paper (with the sticky sides facing down). Using a knife and a skewer I shaped the marshmallow, cutting each end in half to make two mushroom slices. Once the slices were shaped, I dusted on some cocoa powder and used a brown edible marker to add on the darker lines.
• Pepperoni: This one is my favorite! I used red Starburst® candies for the pepperonis. I put each candy in the microwave for 5-10 seconds, then rolled it out with a rolling pin. I used a circular cookie cutter to cut out even circles (you could also just use scissors) and then I placed each flattened, circular piece of candy onto a sheet of wax paper. I used my fingers to raise the surface by poking underneath the slice (to get that sizzled, fresh out of the oven look). I then added a drop of red dye and brown dye to a sponge, blotted it on a piece of scratch paper, and then lightly blotted each candy to add color. I let the candies set for about 30 minutes to allow the coloring to dry. Below is what they looked like as they were drying.