Sunday, January 17, 2010

Baby Cakes!

We had two cakes to do this weekend. Each cake was completely different and required a bit of creativity. The first cake was for a friend of our friend Kellie. They first wanted a Spongebob cake, but the son changed his mind/interests to John Deere. I asked the mother for some toys and was able to use those to embellish a farm themed cake. Have a look:

I thought the farm animal toys really made the cake look realistic.
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Here is an arial view of the cake. They said the child who the cake was for could not stop staring at the cows drinking out of the pond.
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I used cake crumbs to fill the beds of the trailers being hauled by the John Deere tractor.
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The other cake was for our good friends Sheila and Glenn's daughter's first birthday. The said they wanted a monkey cake, with that being the only input my creativity/mind started to flow. Here is a sketch of the concept I came up with.
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I have never baked a cake larger than an 8 inch so it was different baking a 12 inch cake. It took a bit longer and was heavy! Here is the cake covered with baby pink buttercream.
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A two layer second tier of chocolate cake and chocolate buttercream was added on top of the bottom tier.
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I added a small piped simple border.
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We had to carve out a space in the cake for the monkey to rest in. I got a bit nervous while constructing this cake, but it started to come together really well. I used a chopstick to add claw marks to the cake where the monkey was digging in and my mom helped make gumpaste and fondant details.
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They asked for a banana shaped smash cake for the baby so I gave that task to my mom. She did a wonderful job and the baby loved it too!
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We also added some flowers and feathered them with a brush.
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Both families loved the cakes and it was wonderful to take part in making two different birthdays special.