Happy 3rd Birthday Fire Truck Cake

I was so excited to try out my first fire truck cake for my nephew's 3rd birthday party.  I was however unprepared for a few things, time and red.  So often on a DIY channel people only want to know how about the perfection of anything.  Sometimes it can be a process that takes trial and error.   I found making a beautiful cake times time. 
I though that 3 hours would be plenty to finish off the fondant for a cake I made the previous night.  I was wrong.  I spent 4 hours and was not as happy with the execution as I would have liked.  Firstly, the fondant I created was a marshmallow fondant.  Tastier but I just couldn't perfect the recipe.  It was too soft and not stiff enough to create the nice seamlessness I wanted. 

Then I had issues with the red or actually lack of red.  That ate up the majority of my time.  In order to make the fondant as fire engine red as possible, I used 3 bottles of food gel.  Yikes!  It was a long time of pink, pinkish, then it became corral, and finally got the engine fire red I needed. 
At first I was trying to mix with my bare hands and that was a no-no.  I had lovely pinky palms at the party.  I had the same issue with the gray color I wanted.  The fondant was shades of purple even with the black food gel and then just turned black.  I kept it black but was disappointed because I really wanted gray so that the Oreo cookies could stand out.
 
I finished off by decorating with peanut M&Ms because the last birthday we had, turned out that it was the first time my nephew had ever eaten them and he had such a sweet tooth for them that I had to put it on his birthday cake too.

I'm not quite ready to do a DIY on this until I can figure out the fondant and allow myself a generous amount of time.  But as a first attempt, I am happy with it.  What do you think of this fire truck cake?  Yay? Nay?  (Oh, that grass swipe in the first picture was by kid who couldn't manage to grab a M&M.)