Baby shower cake

Two of my very good friends are pregnant and due within a couple of weeks of each other. I hosted a baby shower brunch for them today and you can't have brunch without cake, right?

I bought these daisy cutters a while ago and thought they were a pretty cool shape - I think they kind of look like fireworks. (Side note: does anyone know what the little plastic piece in this set is supposed to be for? I use it to poke out the petals, but I'm guessing it has a more specific purpose.) My plan was to cover the whole cake in baby blue fondant and then add the shapes, but decided late yesterday that life's too short to drive myself crazy and left it fondant free.

Really like the contrast of the chocolate buttercream with the gumpaste colors and am happy with the way it turned out. And as usual, Doug takes the most awesome photos. He could make a grocery store cake look like something Martha Stewart would envy!

Oma's fern cake

I was contacted about making a cake for a 70th birthday party that somehow incorporated greenery and ferns, but not in a very obvious way. I immediately started searching online for some fern shaped cutters or molds, and found what I thought would be an excellent option - a beautiful ferns mold made by CelCakes.

Ha! The mold arrived and I spent the next three nights playing with various formulations of fondant and gumpaste, trying to find the right combination so my ferns would as fabulous as these. On the rare occasion when I did manage to fill the mold, scrape off the excess and get the fern out in one piece, Doug declared that it looked much more like a piece of seaweed than a fern (it's true, it did). Since I wasn't making an underwater mermaid cake, seaweed wasn't an option:) $20 wasted, but lesson learned.

Back to square one, and this time I decided to toss the molds and a much more whimsical approach to ferns, and in particular, fiddleheads. These are all made by hand - rolling out pieces of fondant (not gumpaste, I didn't want them to get too hard and crunchy) and rolling into the fiddlehead shape. I love how it turned out! The cake is vanilla bean, with whipped ganache filling and vanilla buttercream. The letters are funky alphabet tappits (as you can tell, I'm a big fan of these letters!)

Here's a video of the cake in action. Someday I'll learn how to edit. Doug said, "who are you talking to?" The answer? Hopefully you!