sweet!!! thanks for that tip, mehnaz!! 
good job on the cake, Sara! see, easy peasy if you follow the instructions! its not that you can’t make substitutions in baking, its just that you should know a lot more about baking before you attempt them. it just gives you more confidence knowing ahead of time what the end product will be.
Ochef Home Page is a great resource for all sorts of baking-related questions, like subbing one pan size for another and how to change baking time if you do that, what to sub for what ingredient, etc. etc.
for the vanilla box, i’d suggest making filled cupcakes. basically, you bake the cupcakes as directed on the pan, and then you take a piping bag with a thin tip, fill it with the jello pudding of your choice (chocolate or vanilla or whatever), and then squeeze a little bit into our cupcake. you’ll see the cake expand slightly and slightly puff up. thats when you stop squeezing the piping bag and pull it out. then when you ice over it, it hides the tiny hole the piping tip makes and voila! filled cupcakes!
also, excellent job on filling the pan 3/4 of the way through- thats how its done! and throw out the remaining batter, miss. don’t go mixing it into other mixes- you don’t know what it’ll taste like! if i have left over batter, i always make cupcakes from it right after the cake i’m baking is done.
thanks SE! what a lovely thing to say!
i have, and i think mehnaz in her step by step tutorial used fresh strawberries. you can really use any fruit you want- fresh or tinned in a cake. just make sure to pipe some icing along the edges of the cake so when you layer it one on top of the other, the fruit doesn’t ooze out of the edges. this also makes smoothing the sides easier.
i haven’t done any classes- i’ve just self-taught from trial and error and the interweb and all sorts of helpful tutorials. and the first time i made fondant from scratch for the robot cake was with the aide of a lovely friend who does it all the time. it really helps to do it with someone more practiced. i keep meaning to take the Wilton classes but haven’t found a close-enough location to do it.
no offense but i find that really odd. sharing only means you are spreading your knowledge and experience around and if it helps someone else, then why not? its not like those recipes aren’t in Wilton’s cookbooks and on their website, so if its readily available elsewhere, then why not be allowed to distribute it after taking a class? am i missing something here?
its called buttercream icing, so you can call it either buttercream or icing, but its the same thing
a turntable is a rotating plate, essentially. when you place your cake on that, its easier to ice because you dont have to keep rotating the cake in place on your counter, you just rotate the plate easily and you can ice all around.
this is what mine looks like-
http://shopwith.whoisbaby.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/cakedecorating-6.jpg