Graduated Colors

It seems like the latest trend in cake decorating has been graduated colors.  I have always wanted to try this, but thought it would be very time consuming and difficult.  While the first part is true - it IS time consuming, it really wasn't that difficult at all. 

Green is my favorite color, so I thought I would experiment with that.  The trick to doing the graduated colors is pretty simple - Thanks to Half Baked - a caking blog I follow - I too was able to figure out how to do this!  Basically you start with the darkest color you want.  Not the way I would have attempted it, but it makes sense - you do your first bottom row in the dark, then add some white fondant to it.  You then have the next step in color and it is not too drastic of a change. 

One hint though - the base color, before you add the white, halve the amount.  Otherwise, you end up using A LOT of fondant that you don't really need to and have a ton of color left over.  Don't ask me how I know this!  LOL 

My topper for this cake is simply a pear.  I considered using a Granny Smith apple, keeping it in the color scheme, but decided I liked the color and shape of  the pear better.