1st Baby Shower

This one was interesting. My friend and neighbor called to ask if I could do a baby shower cake not long after I was asked if I could do the wedding cake. Luckily, they weren't on the same weekend. The mom to be had some ideas about what she wanted for her cake. She wanted three tiers, one with sports, one with the baby's name, and one with musical instruments. Since we had a few weeks, there were some other requests that came up as they had time to look at some other cakes for ideas. They liked the idea of having baby feet on the top instead of little booties, like some other people do. Also, they liked a cake they saw that had blocks in the middle of the cake. However, they figured that spelling the baby's name would look cool since the name is only four letters. They gave me lots of pictures for inspiration.



The cake itself is white and chocolate marble. There was butter cream icing under the fondant. There were two additional blocks left over since I used an 8 inch square for the blocks, so I left the two spare blocks (without detail decoration), in the event they needed more cake. The bottom tier is a 10 inch round, and the top tier is 8 inch. To hold each tier up, I put plastic drinking straws through the layer below. The trick was balancing the top tier over the blocks so it would be stable.



Note that the top tier is not centered over the bottom one. There was one thing that I did not account for when picking the sizes for my layers. I made the bottom 10 inch, when it would have been better for me to make it 12 inch instead. The reason is that I used the 8 inch square for the middle and cut it into four quadrants. That made each block 4" square. Now, originally I planned to use three blocks on the cake. Unless I positioned them just right, that wouldn't have worked out too well unless I cut off the back of the blocks and just made it look like they were whole. I already had them mostly decorated, so that wasn't going to happen. Consider for a moment if you have a 4" square and you want to put two inside a 10" circle. It's easy if you put the flat sides together, but if you turn them you have a problem. If you look at the positioning of the two blocks, they overlap each other a bit to get them to fit on the cake. Not exactly what I had planned, but it worked in the end. It did make offsetting the top necessary though. It makes it look a little more whimsical though, so I didn't really mind, and nobody at the party was complaining about it.



If you look around the cake views, you can see all of the items added. For sports, there was a basketball, soccer ball, goal posts, and a football. For music, there were musical notes, a guitar, and a drum. I realized as I was writing this that I forgot to put on drumsticks, which I meant to add. Too late now.



Above is a top view so you can see the feet. The little wrinkles in the feet don't really show up in that view though. You can see them in some of the other pictures.

I'm told that every bit of the cake was consumed, except for the blocks. The parents to be wanted to take them back to their military base to everyone could see them. I'm guessing they'll get eaten there.