Mel's Kitchen Creations: Getting my cake on....Oh BABY!

One of my oldest friends is expecting her first child next month and I was honored to create her baby shower cake. She provided me with a napkin as a sample of the shower theme, told me what flavors she wanted and left the rest to me. Of course, I never do cakes completely alone. I'm so blessed to have a husband who is not only incredibly talented, but also enjoys helping me create my cakes.

So, we set out to design the cake. For some reason I kept hitting creative road blocks. Perhaps it's because I wanted so badly for it to be perfect and for the mommy-to-be to totally and completely love it. Who knows, all I can tell you is that I was stumped in a huge way. I had WEEKS to plan this cake and I didn't even really decide on my design until one week before the baby shower.

Alright, before I get to photos of the finished product, I wanted to share a few photos of the cake that I snapped in the process of building the cake. Here we go.....

Once the cakes are baked, I crumb coated them. My next step was to fill the cakes and then stack them. This particular cake was the bottom tier and it was chocolate cake with bittersweet chocolate ganache filling.

While I was filling and stacking the cakes, Dan was busy working away on the little animals. He was molding them out of gum paste.

Once I had the cakes filled and stacked, I put another thin coating of buttercream frosting on them and put them back in the fridge. The next step was to make the fondant and cover the cakes in fondant.

I divided the leftover green fondant into two pieces. I knew that I would need a little bit of green again later. The piece I wasn't using right away I double wrapped it in saran wrap and placed it into a ziplock bag.

After the cakes were covered in fondant we stacked them using dowels for support. Once the cakes were stacked I piped the borders and piped the wording on the cake as well as placed the leaves (this is where I used that green fondant again) and the stars.