It went wrong 2X's

I have been fairly lucky with my cakes, not really having any issues that really couldn't be fixed with a creative cover up like a b/c flower or fondant cut-out

This past weekend I had to make a cake for a little girl who turned 5. They wanted a very simple round cake with the quilted look on fondant and they had supplied a crown to be placed on top of the cake. The border was just round beaded fondant pieces, with pearl dust and those little edible dagrees (sp??).

Anyway, the cake wasn't due until Sunday at noon. So I baked my two cakes friday evening. Let them rest and settle. Saturday afternoon, stacked them with a nice layer of b/c (I did build a stiff dam between the layers) then let them settle for a couple of hours. That evening, I rolled out my fondant, got it on my cake, nice and even & for once smooth .

Then it happened. About an hour my cake had the bulge of all bulges. Right around the middle. It looked like those women who wear super tight jeans and the rolls of fat just puddle on top (muffintop). My cake had a big time muffin top!!!!. So I tried everything I could think of to fix it. There was no way I was going to make this look good. This is now 7:00pm Sat. So I did what I needed to do. RE-DO!

I baked again, let them settle. I had cake nightmares and couldn't sleep so I was up at 4:30am trying to figure out how to do this over. I had to scrap my fondant. I didn't have any more, so now my fondant cake is going to have to be buttercream. BUT.....I didn't have my normal ingredients for my b/c recipe.

I didn't have my high-ratio shortening, so I used crisco. Blagh! My icing was greasy looking. So again, I ice the cakes (dirty iced them first, and let them rest for a bit) I start on my final layer of icing, got it nice and smooth, then again. Friggin cake bulge. Seriously???? How can buttercream bulge??? .

At this point it is going on 9 am. Just a couple of hours to make it look half decent. So I smoothed out the best I could, added the beaded border, did the rest minus the quilted look, cause I wasn't confident enough, and honestly too flipping tired to even try. It turned out okay. Not up to my standards or my hubby's (who is my QC). I explained to the mom (who is a good friend) my problems when she came to pick up the cake. I didn't charge her anything. I felt so bad.

I have no clue what went wrong. I am beginning to think that it may be the actual cake itself. I use DH mixes. Not sure if its the gases being released or the air coming out after having the weight of the fondant/buttercream (if that is a possiblitiy) on it that caused the bulge.
Anyone have any other ideas????

Happy Monday......

ps: I forgot to add, that the mom tried to pay me again this morning when she dropped of her daughter at my house (I do home daycare). She raved that the cake tasted awesome, that the party place loved it and thought it was amazing. Her daughter was so happy with it. But I honestly couldn't except any money.

I had to rebake cause when I peeled off the fondant(which I tried to do very gingerly) part of the cake went with it, mainly the top 2mm of the top layer. I had scraped the cake down to the bare bones, and as I did that some of the cake started to crumble and there were dents and stuff, and I just wasn't happy with the way it looked. I figured (in my warped sense of cake karma) that if this cake wasn't working with fondant, then I wasn't going to try with b/c even though, hindsight it probably would have been okay, maybe a little frankenstienish, but probably workable.
Between the layers, I had a thin layer of b/c and a thicker dam (used the wilton cupler as the applicator) I had left about a 1/4 of an inch from the edge to allow for spreadage from the dam. I didn't use anything to weigh down the cake, never did that before, and never ran into bulges.

Just a bad cake day.
Bad Cake day -1
cakes22- 0

Yup. I had the first layer with the bottom up and the second layer with the leveled side on top of that so that the second layers bottom was facing up (make sense )