Brenda's Baby Shower Cake

Well this post is a little overdue as Brenda has already given birth to beautiful Brittany! However, here is a little bit about the adventure my mom and I had while putting together her baby shower cake.

Since I had just had a baby, we still wanted to do a shower cake for my very dear childhood friend Brenda, but I enlisted my mom for help since I wasn't sure about how such a large cake would go while having a baby. My mom was in charge of doing the baking and prepping the icing, then I just get to waltz in and do all the decorating.. talk about an ideal situation! haha

I have already made a bassinet shower cake for Cindy so I wanted to put a new twist on it. I had seen a few examples of this on cakecentral.com - a white chocolate hood instead of using cake for the hood. I did a practice run with some chocolate melts and a bowl and it seemed to work out OK. You simply spread the melted candy melts onto half of a stainless steel bowl and pop it in the freezer until it hardens and pops out of the bowl easily. I also used some masking tape to create straight edges.

We made marshmallow buttercream tinted pink (she didn't want anything fruity otherwise I would've used raspberry!) and chocolate cake, since Brenda was having chocolate cravings. Yum! I carved the ends of the cake to be more rounded so we could get rid of that square cake look and have more of an oval shape.

I made up some pink icing, green icing, and a little yellow and orange for the 4-color basketweave I wanted to do on the side. The ruffles on the bottom and top of the lower portion of the cake were going to be white, pink, and some details of green.

The sheets of the bassinet were green and I made a criss cross pattern plus used some papertowel pressing to give it a swirly dotted texture if you looked really close.

My favorite thing about the cake was the fondant blanket which I made by rolling out fondant, using a scalloped ribbon cutter for the edges, a circle decorator's tip to cut out the circles and then a star decorator's tip to create a textured "star" effect in diagonals, which you could see through. I loved how it turned out.

That's as far as I got on the Friday before the shower - I was busy on Saturday but came back on Sunday and finished up the cake. I added a little more detail around the bottom green ribbon of buttercream on top of the ruffles. I made the bassinet hood with white chocolate and once we placed that on the cake, I covered it with pink and white buttercream ruffles.

It was a bumpy ride to the shower location so we had a little bit of a mishap with some of the buttercream in the back. I would still do this design again but I would definitely create some kind of a hidden platform on which to place the white chocolate hood so that it had more support instead of the edges of the cake.

We had a great time making the cake and a nice time at the shower seeing Brenda! Congrats Brenda and Kris!