Baby Shower - My Niece Is Nearly Here!

At the end of the month I will (hopefully) become an auntie again. I really hope it's soon as A) I can't wait to meet her! And B) I'm going to Memphis/New Orleans and Mexico in three weeks so I really don't want to miss it.

A baby on the way means of course, a baby shower, and no baby shower would be complete without a cake would it? So I couldn't resist offering to take on the task. Luckily I just happen to know to mother-to-be pretty well...so I had a few ideas up my sleeve. I also did their wedding cake so I couldn't wait to continue the milestone baking.

They're expecting a little girl, and I may have already gotten a little carried away with buying cupcake babygrows and teeny tiny skinny jeans with hearts on.

When they got married, they did it in Lyme and it's really special to them so I wanted to represent it some way in the cake. So I thought the perfect idea would be to use beach huts on the bottom tier, for the top I also saw some quite washing line baby shower cakes with little fondant clothes hung up like bunting which was almost too cute to not do.

The cake was a two tier, Victoria sponge with raspberry jam and vanilla buttercream. I decided to keep the colours pastel with pink, mint and blues. I thought that the beach huts would be nice on the bottom on a blue background with some piped seagulls. I used Ice Blue, Sugarflair colouring for the base. I rolled out one beach hut and kept it as a template for the others. To get the wood panel effect I just used the back of a knife to make the indents. Giving them a white roof and door they were complete, simple and cute.

To give the top tier a bit more colour I added pink fondant strips and dotted holes down the side to give it a stitched fabric look. I thought these would also be good anchor points for the washing lines to hang off. Using some of the beach hut fondant, I let them dry a little and cut out cute little baby clothes positioning them along the line.

To finish each tier I tied a polka dot ribbon and added a bow to the font. Luckily the mother-to-be loved the cake and the personal touches and the whole baby shower was a triumph! There were lots of presents, everyone brought a dish and she didn't suspect a thing right until we shouted 'Surprise!' so all in all a massive success!

 

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Cath Kidston Inspired Cake Pops

It feels like months since I've made cake pops, and probably because, it actually has been months! Which is a shame as I love making them, I've just been too busy so it was nice to have time to do some properly when asked to make a batch.

This particular batch were to be very pretty, pastel, floral and Cath Kidston inspired. Who doesn't life a bit of Cath Kidston? The colours, flowers, polka dots... it's all too cute and I love it.

I made three designs, two floral ones which were similar but with different base colours and one with polka dots standing up in floral cases. The two floral ones were made from being dipped in coloured white chocolate. Half in pink and half in pale blue.



For the floral part I cut out circles of fondant and set them on the cake pops with royal icing, for the flowers I cut out red fondant with flower plungers, added a gold pearl for the bud and again placed them on with royal icing. For the stalk and leaves I piped on green royal icing and to finish piped white pearls around the design.



The polka dot ones were sooo easy to make and look super cute. I saw these mini cupcake cases in the garden center and the floral design fitted in so well I couldn't pass them by. So when I had dipped the cake pops in white chocolate, just before they were set I put them head down in the cases so they stood up. To make them even sweeter I piped pink polka dots around them and boom, they were finished.

To make them look more professional I wrapped them up in their own little individual cellophane bag and silver tie. When they were finished they looked great and like something out of Laura Ashley and I hear they went down a storm.

I even got to use my Wilton cake pop decorating stand that I got for Christmas for the first time. This shows you just how long it's been since I made them.



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