C.A.M. - March Cake

So the March cake is finally finished. I made a new baby themed cake to celebrate the birth of my new nephew, Makaio, decorated with fondant features such as mummy and baby turtle and mummy and baby owl toppers. I chose to include the owl and turtle in the design since my family has always passed down stories of our family ancestors taking on the shape of the owl and turtle to guard over us, so this cake is quite sentimental to me.

I used the Exclusively Foods chocolate mud cake recipe, layered with a milk chocolate ganache and Orchard brand fondant. I added texture to several of the pieces such as the grass, turtle shells and tree trunk using Fiskar's texture plates and added the stitching detail with the end of a toothpick (I used one of those fondant embossing tools for most of the large leaves but decided I preferred the look from the toothpick).

It's funny but looking at this photo I can't see anything I'm really unhappy with BUT when I was putting this cake together I was nearly in tears because I was convinced it was an utter failure! First of all, I had trouble putting the fondant on the cake. The cake is just over 6" tall and it was the first time I had ever covered such a tall cake. DH was also trying to 'help' me and getting in my way so I was getting quite frustrated with him!
I had a couple of little tears in the fondant which I was able to cover up with the decorations and DH moved the fondant as I was rolling it out over the cake and I ended up with not enough on that side! Needless to say I was pretty angry with him about that but I was able to cover it up again. I read something recently saying that the difference between a professional cake decorator and an amateur is that the professional knows how to cover up their mistakes. Well, if that's true then maybe I should open a business because you can't see most of my mistakes lol!!
I had made the decorations for the cake all in advance but unfortunately I hadn't stored the turtles properly so they had dried out a bit too much by the time I went to put them on the cake and I ended up breaking both of them in 1-2 spots :( I was able to join them back together to put on the cake but you can still see the spots where they broke.

No, my cake isn't crooked (trust me, I used my spirit level while making it lol!), but my cake stand is!
You can see quite easily in this picture that my fondant was far from perfect. Also, the grass border didn't line up properly under the tree trunk.

Despite all the problems I'm still pretty happy in the end. I don't know if I would be happy selling this cake to a customer without a huge discount, BUT the cake tasted lovely, it didn't fall apart, and most of it looks great. Just have to work more on covering the cake with fondant and not let my decorations dry out too much before putting on the cake.