It's a boy!

Dear all,

I just completed my first cake on demand! A friend of my mother's was celebrating the birth of her grandson. That of course calls for cake and my mother asked if I would make one... of course!

The request was to keep the cake simple, preferably vanilla cake with apricots. Your wish is my command! I made two Victoria sponge cakes with apricot jam filling. Here we go:

Like I said, I made two cakes, square ones in this case. I shaved off a little bit to make them fit. I then stuck them together with a generous helping of apricot jam (shop bought due to time constraints I'm afraid).



I decided to decorate the cake with fondant icing which requires a bit of buttercream icing to make it stick. My "customer" is not a big fan of lots of buttercream (and neither am I to be honest - a necessary evil) so I tried to use it sparingly:



Now for the good stuff! Decorating this cake was so much fun! I decided to make it look like a parcel with a big bow on top. So with some pretty baby blue icing I put together this bow. To keep it from going flat I used some cotton wool (which I took it out once it had set). Then I covered the cake with white fondant icing embossed with a festive pattern.




Putting the cake together: adding ribbons and eventually sticking on the bow: success! Starting to look good, no? I made the ribbon and bow extra pretty with some pearl sheen powder. Woohoo!



The finishing touch was the text ribbon along the bottom and the cute baby boy decorations. Here is the cake from all sides!




I had such a good time with this cake, even though it was a little scary to make something like that for someone I don't really know. And I'm definitely getting better at the fondant icing thing, though I need more practice finishing it off (invisible seems etc - difficult with a pattern on it as well). On to the next baby-shower cake next week, exciting! I better start brainstorming...

xoxo Jennifer