Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Birthday Cake

Phew, that's a mouthful. "TMNT" as they are now called are back and revamped. I wasn't too familiar with the characters, but they still live in a sewer and eat a lot of pizza I am told. So I designed this cake for a special 5 year old birthday. I made the first tier of the cake square to resemble a pizza box. I covered it in white fondant and added red fondant letters to the side plus writing with edible markers and piped frosting. The second tier was the part of the sewer that the turtles were crawling out of. I covered the round tier in gray fondant and added marks to look like a manhole cover, then added the yellow caution tape as a border at the bottom. I created a fondant logo that made the birthday boy's name look like the current "TMNT" logo and placed it in the front. For the top, I molded the turtles' heads out of green fondant and added their eyes, masks and hands with more fondant. Then I used a 6" circle of cardboard covered with more gray fondant to make a manhole cover to sit on top of their heads. The fun detail for this cake was the slice of pepperoni pizza that I created out of fondant to sit on top of the pizza box. I cut a "slice" of beige fondant and hand-molded a crust. Then I covered the crust in red cream cheese icing like sauce. I topped the sauce with fondant stretched out like cheese and circles of fondant pepperoni, pressing in white non-pareils for detail. Then I dusted the crust with a little cocoa powder and added pools of "grease" in the cheese with an edible orange marker. It looked so real that my daughter was actually turned off! This was the first cake she didn't like because I "put pizza on cake...yuck!" But the birthday boy liked it, and that's what mattered.