Today was a baby shower for my friend Kristin and her friend Amy (a joint baby shower thrown by Ann Marie - who asked me to make the cake). Today was also, coincidentally, the first day we had real snow sticking to the ground in Eagle River. And it's the 10th of November!
For this cake I wanted to make something simple and gender neutral since Kristin is expecting a boy and Amy is expecting a girl. After lots of googling I decided on teddy bears and rocking horses and found a great example to follow. I won't show you what the example cake looked like because mine turned out nothing like it. I'm not complaining though, this cake did turn out quite cute.
The cake itself is a buttermilk cake out of Joy of Cooking with chocolate buttercream frosting. I love frosting cakes that are going to be covered in fondant - no pressure to make it perfect!
I do love the way fondant looks, but it is a lot of work. Almost as soon as I started rolling it out I enlisted Ryan's help. He is an expert fondant roller. It's the only part of cake decorating I've ever roped him into helping with (besides the clean up).
Fondant is supposed to be rolled out into a big circle, draped over the cake, smoothed to fit the shape of the cake, and trimmed on the bottom. This has NEVER worked for me. I've watched YouTube video after YouTube video on how to do it. It looks REALLY simple, but I assure you it's not. Maybe if I ever actually took a cake decorating class I'd learn the secret that I'm convinced they're editing out of all the videos. In the meantime, my fondant cakes always have seams.
Ryan had a brilliant idea this time though to cut a circle of fondant for the top of the cake and then a strip to put around the walls of the cake. It worked like a charm and then all I had to do was put some frosting dots along the seam to cover it up. I should rope him into cake decorating more often!
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