Progress... I think

The cakes have been baked, the icing has been made. The cake boards have been assembled. The candy light bulbs have been molded and the visions of cake hitting the ground in a parking garage by the convention center has flashed through my mind about once an hour, for the last week.
Alas, I started to cut, trim and assemble the cakes. I found with a blog, using a google search for 'star cakes', that demonstrated how to make the shape with two circle cakes. So I will show you since I cannot tell you what blog it was that showed me. First make two round cakes of the same size. In my pictures they are double stacked so I have made 4 cakes for each level. Translates to 12 cakes total, I would say yum, but we are not doing a calorie break down. That was just gross.
Back to your round cakes. Take the first cake and cut it into 8 pie pieces. Like so:

Mmmmm, Pie.

Then trim the round edges and make them triangles. Next take the un-cut cake, and make it an octagon. Just trim the round off the outside, don't cut too far into the cake if you want to keep the size. Then put your triangles trimmed sides to the octagon trimmed sides.

Special note, making a star this way give plenty of extra snacking pieces of cake for the baker!
Then use your icing as glue to hold it all together. Then ice!
But prior to icing the cake you will want to color your icing. This is easy to do in the blender while making your icing, unless you have 9 batches of icing in a 5 gallon bucket. Then you will need to use a concrete mixing drill attachment and an electric drill.

Thanks to Wonderful Husband for mixing, although I think he really wanted to be the first to use the mixing bit, icing or concrete.
Of course icing is much thicker than concrete, or can be, and was. The picture I should have got was the smoke billowing out of tired drill, that was laid to rest in a snow bank after the mixing was done.
Next, first layer of butter cream.
Side note, Gaynell the butter cream icing is just what it is called. technically speaking you don't have to use Crisco, you can use butter, or butter flavored Crisco. Although it tastes better with the butter flavor, for the sake of color the plain Crisco is best.

I really like the technique I have decided to use. It really cuts down on the need to make the icing perfect. I actually need it very thick and messy! This is also a good thing when I messed up the cut on one of the small cake. Just a little bit of tricky trimming and the extra icing and fixed! Of course that is an easy fix because I know that no-one will be eating this cake. That has also help me slip back into the bad habit of licking my fingers....