Grandma's Detroit Tigers Cake

It might sound like a strange combination - Grandma's 90th Birthday and the Detroit Tigers, but if you knew Grandma Bliss, you'd know she's faithfully watched every Tigers game that she could and has been doing this for a long time. I must admit I'm not sure how many years she's been a giant Tigers fan, but considering this was her 90th birthday, she's been a fan a lot longer than anyone else I know.

So Chris and I were talking about cake ideas and we decided to scrap the fuddy duddy grandma style cake and go for something more fun and festive - Detroit Tigers. I looked up some ideas over the following days and I saw that most baseball themed cakes are for young boys' birthdays but I figured I would just go ahead and mesh the Detroit Tigers with some tiers and roses and "class it up" a bit.

The cake was just your general chocolate flavor (grandma's favorite) with a blackberry cream filling and I used my usual buttercream frosting for the rest of the cake. I stuck with a blue and orange color scheme and made some scroll work and also some orange roses. It was a very warm and humid day so I had a little trouble keeping the icing cool but it turned out OK. I bought some plastic tubes to help support the upper tier which I cut to be the exact height of the lower tier, just in case we had any "sinking".. this seemed to work out just fine.

I used fondant and created a pennant which I let dry for a few days prior to the party, and used regular markets (no one was going to eat this stuff) to create the Detroit "D" and write out the Happy Birthday Thelma sign. I must admit I had a minor meltdown when I was working on the pendant and The Husband said "Wife.... " and I knew he spotted a mistake. Sure enough - Happy Birtday was in the works. AWESOME. I was so mad that just wasted 30 minutes. After my meltdown, my second pennant (which I didn't like as well, of course) only took 20 minutes. I also used a styrofoam ball (which was too large, I know) and sketched out the baseball stitches and another Detroit "D" for use as the cake topper.

The fondant never really hardened (I should switch over to gum paste I think) so the ball and pennant weren't perfect by the time I had moved them all around and adjusted everything. The other mishap was that on the way to the party, the front orange rose fell off onto its face taking a few inches of side icing with it. I had The Husband pull over briefly while I patted it back into place as best I could... great, so it was lumpy and right in the front. Oh well, I hoped Grandma wouldn't notice ...

It was an awesome party at Chris' house, it was wonderful spending a day with the Bliss family, especially those family members who live far away! Grandma seemed pleased with her cake so I was happy having had a chance to make probably the only Happy 90th Birthday Grandma Detroit Tigers cake ever made in the history of man.