LaLa Cake: It's a Boy! Baby Shower Cake

It's a Boy!

Another baby shower cake for August! Who doesn't love babies and who doesn't love celebrating their upcoming cuteness?... especially when there is cake involved!? Certainly no one I know...or at least no one I know that will admit it to my cake lady face. This cake was more for a baby arrival dinner party than a baby shower. Little William Gabriel was in attendance as the main event. With all that cuteness in one place I'm hoping the cake was at least the third cutest thing there! (Momma and baby William get first and second prize of course)

So "my journey is to cake perfection" right? It is the tag line to this blog after all... But how do I do that with each cake? Something I try to do is to really pay attention to my mistakes and to my wins, to keep a mental log of everything I've learned to apply it to the next cake. Recipes are fairly easy to tweak and tweak until you get them just right but cake decorating I've found is a little more mentally draining. Since I'm never making the same exact cake twice it's sometimes harder to nail down decorating skills. But that doesn't mean it's impossible. Most cakes have the same basic steps of decorating with a lot of skills being crossed used for many different applications.

So don't lose heart too quickly while caking after all it is just cake. Take comfort in knowing that every cake I make tends to have the "I don't think I can do this" moments...but the cake always has to be finished, after all someone did pay and is expecting not only a delicious but beautiful creation. We really have no choice but to finish the cakes we start. And once we do finish, most cakes will look a little better than the last one, proving to our sometimes shattered mental state, that all the sweat and tears and (uhhmm) angry bursts are worth it and oh that "journey to cake perfection" is that much farther along.

(Hope you enjoyed this motivational cake tip!)

Keep scrolling for a quick How-To on this cake!
Enjoy life with cake!
Leah

P.s. Not seeing what you need to know on how to make this or any cake???
Leave me a comment and I'll help you out!

Baby Shower Cake

This was on of the most fondant-less cakes I've made to date. What no fondant?? Well almost none. I couldn't leave it off completely. Since starting to make cake for clients in the last year or so I am surprised at the number of people who tell me they do not like fondant. (Or at least think they don't). I agree that sometimes it can be a little too sweet on top cake and frosting but if that is fondants only fault I'll take it! The decorating possibilities with fondant are pretty much as endless as the cakers ability. Fondant gives a clean canvas look that buttercream can't. Plus you really don't have to eat it, even though it's edible it can be left on the plate.

I started with three different colors in piping bags with Wilton's #4 open tip.

Starting out I was not quite sure exactly how to texturize the buttercream.

My original plan was to do this stitching pattern throughout the entire cake.

Trying to replicate this pattern on the cake however was more challenging than I thought. Most of my cakes haven't required tons of piping but more fondant working, which hasn't helped enhance my piping skills. This is something I'm usually not aware of until I try to pipe perfectly straight lines or patterns like this onto cakes.