Donna and Kristy's Wedding Cake

A few months ago, two of my besties, Donna and Kristy, told me they were having a backyard wedding and I quickly jumped at the opportunity to give them an awesome present... aka a cake!!  I literally had about a month and a half to obsess over cakes... watch more shows, google pictures, recipes, peruse magazines... you name it I was trying to work it out in my head!  Being the extreme procrastinator that I am, I waited until the week of the celebration to try anything out!  I took the day before the wedding off and baked/decorated for a good solid 10 hours.  I decided to go with a pound cake because I was mildly terrified that the cake would cave in upon itself if I used a soft recipe.  I added chocolate chips as per the girls request and it came out rich, thick and delicious.  I'll paste the recipe below!!  In between making one and a half batches of this recipe, I started making my fondant hibiscus flowers.  I was super nervous because I had NEVER worked with fondant before... I had only seen it a thousand times on television.  i started by dying my fondant (and fingers) a dark creamy shade of pink.  I rolled out little bits of fondant until they were pretty thin and used a 5 petal flower cutter to start.  PS IF YOU'RE ROLLING OUT FONDANT... INVEST IN A SILICONE MAT!!  It's so much easier and cleaner than using little handfuls of powdered sugar to keep it from sticking... definitely one of my favorite tricks learned!!  Since I didn't have any of the fancy tools for fondant, I had to improvise!!  Once I had the flower cut out, I used the rounded end of a paint brush to press lightly around the edges to give them that scalloped look.  I used a toothpick to drag along each petal to give them a look of natural veining.  Once that was all done, I put a small dot of fondant in the middle and inserted a Wilton flower stamen.  I then just cupped them into a mini cupcake pan to give them the rounded shape and let them dry!!  A little luster dust and they were all set!!  All in all I ended up making over 50 tiny hibiscus flowers in both pink and teal, 48 lemonade cupcakes with cherry frosting and one and a half recipes of chocolate chip pound cake.  Hence the 10 hours of crazy!!  I'll also post the recipe for the Dymer Cupcakes below... they're sweet, fruity and refreshing!!  ENJOY!!