Dora and Boots cake - how to

I made this Dora and Boots cake for a friend of mine who's daughter turned 3. It wasn't necessarily hard to make but it did take a while! It was like making a puzzle!

I started with a 24 cm round vanilla cake which I filled with strawberry flavored butter cream. I also thinly coated the outside with it. Usually I use ganache to make the cake straight and easy to work with but the roundness of the cake was already pretty perfect so I didn't feel it was necessary.

I then coated the cake with pink marzipan and let it harden overnight. This way I could trace my Dora and Boots picture into the cake so I would have a good reference for adding all those puzzle pieces.
The picture I took from internet. It was really tiny but I have an easy way of making it exactly the right size.

I open the picture in microsoft picture viewer and zoom in until it's the size I need. I then take some sturdy paper and trace the picture right off the screen. It saves the hassle of having to blow up the picture with a copier or something and printing it out.
After the marzipan had hardened a little I took the picture and placed it on the cake. I then used a thin pointed cake decorating tool (a scriber I guess) to trace over the picture. You have to press a little so the lines go into the cake, but not too much that it goes right through the paper.

After this I cut out all the different pieces of the picture so I had little templates. And then it was just a matter of cutting them out of fondant or marzipan. The hassle was really coloring all the fondant and cutting all those little pieces. Because the picture was scribed onto the cake it was very easy to put the pieces in the right place.

I placed the eyes on top of the face because I thought it would make them stand out more, as they also do in the animation. Dora's mouth I pressed down a little to create depth, and Boots' mouth I actually just painted on (except for his tongue) because I found it too delicate to try and cut it out properly with those extra lines. The noses are also painted on.
Boots' hair stands up a little and Dora's hair rests partly on her forehead, just for a little added depth. I also scribed some of the lines into the fondant pieces (like the collar of Dora's shirt) and painted some too (like Boots' hand). 

I added some big flowers from corresponding fondant colors to the side and the name plus age on top, just to finish it off.

I think it turned out really sweet!