I’ve showed this finished cake before but never actually posted detail shots. Let’s remedy that.
A few years ago a co-worker of my brother’s asked if I could make a cake matching an image she’d found online.
At the time it didn’t occur to me to check online to see whose design it was. I just looked now and can’t find an exact source. I can see it listed on Cake Picture Gallery without a source, and a very similar design here on cakesdecor.com credited to Berliosca Cake Boutique in BC. I don’t know whose came first. In any case, I was asked to make just one tier, no water/bridge/statue, and told she’d provide the apple herself.
I decided to build it up with a checkerboard cake, partly because I needed the height from the three layers to fit the skyline, and partly because I loved the idea of a New York-themed cake having a taxi cab-esque checkerboard on the inside. (It’s deliciouser on the inside. Heh.)
I leveled the cakes and filled them with homemade buttercream, then did a crumb coat around the entire cake. I let that set up in the fridge while tinting some store-bought white fondant into the pale gray-ish blue color. Rolled it out and covered the cake.
I bought pre-tinted black fondant and rolled out a thick disc to set the cake on, then rolled out some strips the height of my tallest building. I eyeballed the building placement, going off the sample pic and just tried to make sure I had some variation in heights for interest. You can see in the pic below that I used a toothpick to support the tallest building. I cut out the buildings in groupings of 2-3 and ‘glued’ them around the cake with a bit of water. I stuck them on after setting the cake in place, so I could make sure to butt them down as low as possible to the ‘road’.
I thinned some black food gel and dotted the ‘stars’ around the sky, and used Wilton whitener for the road markings and the ‘windows’. Sadly I didn’t think to thicken the whitener with a bit of icing sugar, so it paled considerably once dried, and I had to do a second coat on most of them. To make the adorable taxis I tinted some white fondant yellow and shaped it into a rectangular brick. I cut off the outside corners with a sharp knife then sliced the resulting “T” shape into car-appropriate widths. The wheels are tiny flattened disks of black fondant, everything ‘glued’ together with a bit of water.
The last thing to do was the grass for the top. I knew they’d be adding the apple on-site, but making a green fondant disk felt too easy. I had leftover buttercream so I tinted it green and hand-piped the blades of grass with a piping bag and multi-holed icing tip. 
I later received this pic from the woman who’d bought the cake. I love seeing the inside, seeing that the checkerboard lined up properly! 😀
jeloca.com 