I'm making a Spiderman cake where I've got him on top of a brick building. It's going to be a fairly simple cake to do but I'm having a little trouble with the bricks. They will be made from fondant and since bricks aren't uniform in color, I'm not really sure how I should color them. I'm thinking if I marble the fondant it might not look right. Also, I'm going to push each brick into the frosting to make it look like the mortar between them. What color should I tint the frosting? Should I just leave it white? Thanks for any help in advance!

I think what cakesrock said is right on all counts! I had originally thought of making individual bricks in three or four different shades and placing them on the cake, but that would take forever, now, wouldn't it?

I've never painted, only used coloring to tint the fondant. Is it hard to do? Also I don't have an impression mat but maybe I can find something else that has texture to it. The bricks will be a redish color so terra-cotta would be the perfect color to use.

You could tint your fondant the color you want most of the bricks to be. And if you don't have an impression mat, you could score your rolled-out fondant like brickwork (although this would be a time-consuming proposition, too). Then once you've got the fondant in place on your cake, you could go back and paint some of the bricks in different, but similar, tones. I paint by dissolving gel color in a little vodka and applying it directly with a paintbrush (try out a little on a separate piece of fondant before you do it directly to the cake, though, to be sure you've actually got the color you want and so you'll know how much paint to put on your brush to get the desired effect). You can go darker by using more color and less vodka, and you can go lighter by adding a little white to your mixture.

Sounds east enough (just time consuming like you all said!) but then I knew I'd be spending some time on it so that's alright. Thanks for all the advice!

Go to Michael's or hobby lobby...they carry Duff cake supplies and his line carries a brick impression mat. Easy to use while the fondant is still soft you can press the mat into the fondant leaving the impression. Use powder colors like various browns and burgandy and black...using a paint brush dry brush the powder...it will give it nice effect...just use each color on different bricks...varying the color of the bricks! Good luck!

I have never done this on a cake, but I wonder if you could make buttercream bricks using a technique similar to what miniaturists use for brick siding on dollhouses? My mom and her sister did it once and it was really interesting. The side of the house was painted a pale grey first, for the mortar, and then the "bricks" were created on top with what amounts to a stencil -- a sheet of something sort of like mesh masking tape. It had rectangular holes in it, in a running pattern like you normally see on a brick wall. They put that up against the wall and then spackled on some sort of red plaster/stucco type stuff. Then lifted the masking sheet, and what was left on the wall was like the outer surface of the bricks, with slightly recessed grey "mortar" areas in between.

Anyway, it seems to me that the surface texture of BC (NOT smoothed after it was applied) would be more realistic than fondant, for bricks, and it would probably be easier to get a natural-looking color variation. I don't know quite how you'd make the masking sheet though.

Holly