FONDANT MAKING, A SKILL THAT NEEDS A LOT OF EXPERIENCE AND PRACTICE - MY FIRST TRY!

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After trying out different recipes for fondant dough and failing to make something that could be easily be worked on, I finally made my perfect fondant dough.
Though this recipe makes a lot of mess but the results are worth the mess!
I'll share my recipe of fondant some other day because am more excited to share my fondant decoration I did on the cake today.
Fondant cakes are trending a lot these days, and people pay a lot of money buying customized cakes for birthdays, anniversaries, graduation party, reception, etc. The last time I bought a fondant cake was at my daughter's first birthday which was last august and i paid a lot more than the product was worth. no doubt it was beautiful but then with skills and experience one can make easily. So that day i realized that I'll some how try to learn this skill.
My first task was to make a nice fondant dough which i managed to complete after many attempts, once the dough was made, which was merely a day ago, my next step was to make a nice decorated cake out of it. I am one of those people who are too impatient to bring their plans to reality as soon as possible. After a day's wait, when i could wait any longer, I finally pulled the block of fondant dough from the freezer and kept it aside until thaw. i made a nice marble round cake and let it cool down before starting my fondant preparations.
i planned on making something that will go with the Valentine's theme as it's the nearest occasion, thus i used red and white colors in my fondant. So i divided my fondant dough into two halves and added red food color to one half. after kneading in the color i stamped out hearts and flowers from it using cookie cutter, ( i'm still not equipped with fondant tool ).
after getting these shapes made according to my requirement i kept them in a dish and into the freezer again to settle them down.
then i covered my cake with butter icing and then covered it with the thin layer of fondant. Then I placed the hearts and flowers on top of it and with small silver beads I added details to the decoration.
though I didn't make anything too fancy or too neat, but i was kind of happy with what i made as it was my very first try.
One thing that i didn't like was that after half an hour or so few cracks appeared on my fondant. I have no idea why the cracks appeared so I'd love to know the possible reasons if any of you know...
Here are a few pictures of my first try, hope you all like the fondant cake I made.
sorry for such a low picture quality, took these in a hurry... :)