I made this cake for a 50th birthday party. I had a few ideas of how I wanted to go about doing this, but my best idea actually came from my husband. I had planned on making the whole dartboard on the top of the cake out of fondant, but he suggested that I just paint the colors on a large piece of fondant (that I put on the top of the cake before I painted it). I think it turned out pretty well, but I did have a few issues with this cake.
The cake was chocolate with plain buttercream. The cake was HUGE, a 14 inch round cake that was three layers of chocolate cake. The top was made from a large piece of marshmallow fondant (that I made myself! ) that I rolled out to be the same size as the cake. I then tinted another piece of the fondant black and made the outlining piece around all of the colored tiles. I mapped out the image of the dartboard and made light impressions in the fondant to have good grid on which to paint the colors, and mixed food coloring with a little lemon juice until it was the consistency of paint.
After I painted all the little tiles on the top of the cake, I went in with buttercream in a star tip and did the white outline. Then I wrote the message in black buttercream on the side of the cake (in my atrocious handwriting) and combined green and white icing together in one pastry bag (I might do a post on how to do this sometime, it turns out to be a pretty cool effect) and piped a border around the base of the cake. I finished the border with little red piped stars.
The issue I had with this cake had to do with the weight of the fondant on the top of the cake. I probably should have covered the entire cake in fondant, but I wanted to try just having the top piece because not everyone loves fondant, even if it is made out of delicious marshmallows! The weight of the fondant started making the buttercream icing on the side of the cake pull away from the cake and made me have a mini stroke the entire time I was playing around with this. I just hope that it made it through the party without falling off!!
I finished the whole cake with real darts that I bought at a local sporting goods store that were really cute with gold sparkly stars all over them. All in all, I had a good time making this cake, and I think my painting skills are improving and I'd like to incorporate this onto projects in the future. The only problem with painting on fondant or buttercream that I have found is that it seems like the "paint" doesn't ever seem to dry, so you have to be very careful that you don't accidentally bump into it while working on different parts of the cake, which is why I always try to reserve this part until the very end.
Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy!