A Farm Cake for Jack's First Birthday

I was so excited to have the opportunity to bake a birthday cake for John and Lisa's little bundle of joy - Jack! He's such a sweet little boy and deserved a sweet little cake! I looked through a few ideas online and gave Lisa some options and we all loved the idea of a cute little farm and barnyard cake so we went with that. I saw several excellent examples on CakeCentral.com and came up with the general plan ahead of time.

I started with creating the farm animals out of fondant on Tuesday night, and then they got a dollup of food coloring painted onto them on Wednesday night. I especially loved the pigs with their squiggly tails and the sheep, which required rolling several small balls of fondant and "pasting" them onto the bodies.

Thursday I had to bake the cakes and I also made the marshmallow buttercream filling, and the rice crispy treats to form the barn and then let everything cool overnight. Friday night was the big night where I made 6 batches of buttercream and got on the crumb coat and top coat of light green icing, and then multiple colors for the details.

I did buy store-bought black icing from Kroger to do the roof of the barn and that worked out really well, I never realized they had that and it's very difficult to get jet black frosting using food coloring but sometimes you do need some black accents, especially with children's cartoon-like cakes.

The rice crispy treat barn got frosted with red, black and white accents, and I stuck a skewer into the horse head to be stabbed into the barn once it was on the cake. This resulted in a little bit of smooshing my barn but oh well.

There was chocolate frosting mud for the piggies to be playing in, and I used dark green frosting for grass accents and the leaf/vine border around the bottoms of the cakes.

Yellow frosting was used for pond weeds and hay and little chicks. I meant to use it for the mane of the horse but I forgot! White frosting was used for the chickens, ducks, and the fence around the sides of the cake.

My frosting handwriting skills aren't that great so I covered it up by putting black polka dots which softened the look a bit. My cow legs were molded separately and I attached them to the bodies with toothpicks which also were dug into the cake for stability.

The cake was french vanilla flavored, with strawberry and marshmallow buttercream filling. The smash cake (the little cake given to the little tot to get messy with while eating) featured a pond scene and a #1 candle, while the main cake was a barn yard scene.

I made sure not to use any fondant on the smash cake as I didn't want anything hard that could pose a danger for a 1 year old. Just buttercream!

Watching little Jack eat the cake was tooo cute, and we had an excellent time with John and Lisa's family and friends at Jack's birthday party.

Too cute!